John Carmack of ID comments on OS's
Joe Anstett
Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
various operating systems moving forward.
*********************************************************************
Win32
Win32 rules the world. You are sticking your head in the sand if you think
otherwise. The upside is that windows really doesn't suck nowdays. Win 95 /
NT 4.0 are pretty decent systems for what they are targeted at. I currently
develop mostly on NT, and Quake 2 will almost certainly be delivered on
win32 first. Our games should run as well as possible in NT, we won't
require any '95 only features.
Dos
We are not going to do another dos game. No amount of flaming hate mail is
going to change my mind on this (PLEASE don't!). The advantages of good
TCP/IP support, dynamic linking, powerfull virtual memory, device drivers,
etc, are just too much to overcome. Yes, all of those can be provided under
dos in various ways, but it just isn't worth it.
Linux
I consider linux the second most important platform after win32 for id.
From a biz standpoint it would be ludicrous to place it even on par with
mac or os/2, but for our types of games that are designed to be hacked,
linux has a big plus: the highest hacker to user ratio of any os. I don't
personally develop on linux, because I do my unixy things with NEXTSTEP,
but I have a lot of technical respect for it.
MacOS
From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
and it doesn't matter all that much. We have professional ports done to
MacOS instead of unsupported hack ports, which is a mixed blessing. They
come out a lot later (still waiting for quake...), but are more full
featured. I have zero respect for the MacOS on a technical basis. They just
stood still and let microsoft run right over them from waaay behind. I
wouldn't develop on it.
OS/2
A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else.
SGI
I don't particularly care for IRIX as a development environment (compared
to NT or NEXTSTEP), but SGI has the coolest hardware to run GL apps on.
Safe to assume future IRIX ports, but its not exactly a top priority.
AIX / OSF / HPUX / SOLARIS
I wouldn't start a port to any of these, but if a trusted party (Zoid)
wanted to do them, I probably wouldn't object.
BeOS
I bought a BeBox because I am a solid believer in SMP, and I like clean,
from-scratch systems. I was left fairly non plussed by it. Yes, it is lean
and mean and does a couple things better than any other OS I have seen, but
I just don't see any dramatic advantages to it over, say, NEXTSTEP. Lion
(the company doing the mac quake port) has a BeOS port of quake sort of
working, and have my full support in releasing it, but it will be strictly
an act of charity on their part, so don't expect too much.
Plan9
I spent a few months running Plan9. It has an achingly elegent internal
structure, but a user interface that has been asleep for the past decade. I
had an older version of quake dedicated server running on it (don't ask me
for it -- I lost it somewhere) and I was writing a civilized window manager
for it in my spare time, but my spare time turned out to be only a couple
hours a month, and it just got prioritized out of existance.
NEXTSTEP
My faviorite environment. NT and linux both have advantages in some areas,
but if they were on equal footing I would choose NEXTSTEP hands down. It
has all the power of unix (there are lots of things I miss in NT), the best
UI (IMHO, of cource), and it just makes sense on so many more levels than
windows. Yes, you can make windows do anything you want to if you have
enough time to beat on it, but you can come out of it feeling like you just
walked through a sewer.
In the real world, things aren't on equal footing, and I do most of my work
on NT now. I hold out hope that it may not stay that way. If apple Does The
Right Thing with rhapsody, I will be behind them as much as I can. NEXTSTEP
needs a couple things to support games properly (video mode changing and
low level sound access). If apple/next will provide them, I will personally
port our current win32 products over.
If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in
rhapsody, I would be very likely to give my win NT machine the cold
shoulder and do future development on rhapsody. (I really don't need
Quickdraw3D evangelists preaching to me right now, thank you)
Eric Bennett
In article <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>
"Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes:
> Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
> systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
> minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
> religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
> various operating systems moving forward.
>
> *********************************************************************
[snip]
> MacOS
> From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
> and it doesn't matter all that much. We have professional ports done to
> MacOS instead of unsupported hack ports, which is a mixed blessing. They
> come out a lot later (still waiting for quake...), but are more full
> featured. I have zero respect for the MacOS on a technical basis. They just
> stood still and let microsoft run right over them from waaay behind. I
> wouldn't develop on it.
Well, it's hard to disagree with him from a developer's viewpoint.
Especially a *game* developer's viewpoint. Lack of PM is no fun for a
developer. And as a games developer, I doubt he cares very much for
the good Apple technologies like OT, ColorSync, and QuickDraw GX.
--
Eric Bennett ( er...@pobox.com ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )
Conversion/viewer software for cross-platform file formats at
http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/xplat/xplat.html
Richard Steiner
Here in comp.os.os2.advocacy, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com>
spake unto us, saying:
>Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about
>operating systems.
Interesting comments. I find his honesty somewhat refreshing. :-)
--
-Rich Steiner >>>---> rste...@skypoint.com >>>---> Bloomington, MN
Written offline using PC Yarn + Yep + FTE under OS/2 Warp 4
43% of all statistics are worthless.
Peter A. Koren
In article <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>, jans...@world2u.com says...
>
>Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
>minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
>religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
>various operating systems moving forward.
>
>NEXTSTEP
>My faviorite environment. NT and linux both have advantages in some areas,
>but if they were on equal footing I would choose NEXTSTEP hands down. It
>has all the power of unix (there are lots of things I miss in NT), the best
>UI (IMHO, of cource), and it just makes sense on so many more levels than
>windows. Yes, you can make windows do anything you want to if you have
>enough time to beat on it, but you can come out of it feeling like you just
>walked through a sewer.
>
>In the real world, things aren't on equal footing, and I do most of my work
>on NT now. I hold out hope that it may not stay that way. If apple Does The
>Right Thing with rhapsody, I will be behind them as much as I can. NEXTSTEP
>needs a couple things to support games properly (video mode changing and
>low level sound access). If apple/next will provide them, I will personally
>port our current win32 products over.
>
>If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in
>rhapsody, I would be very likely to give my win NT machine the cold
>shoulder and do future development on rhapsody. (I really don't need
>Quickdraw3D evangelists preaching to me right now, thank you)
>
The fact that there is a GnuStep port in the works for Linux means we may well
see a flow of Apple OpenStep apps onto Linux boxes. I believe that GnuStep
ought to be a top priority for the Linux community.
Pete
pcg...@ibm.net
In <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes:
|Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
|systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
|minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
|religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
|various operating systems moving forward.
Judging from the comments below, it is easy to see how one makes lots
of money programming games for teenage boys: think like a teenager.
"Win32 rules the world" ??
"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
"MacOS
From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
and it doesn't matter all that much."
There's lots more in there; but, unless you ascribe to the Cult of
Personality, there's not much meat. Just one more entrapeneur saying:
"Show me the money!" Yawn
Phil "Guido" Cava TeamOS/2
Help, PC!
Let us help you achieve Warp Speed today!
email at: pcg...@ibm.net
> Proud Member: Jeff Glatt OS/2 Zealots list, 01-MAR-97!
|*********************************************************************
|
|Win32
|Win32 rules the world. You are sticking your head in the sand if you think
|otherwise. The upside is that windows really doesn't suck nowdays. Win 95 /
|NT 4.0 are pretty decent systems for what they are targeted at. I currently
|develop mostly on NT, and Quake 2 will almost certainly be delivered on
|win32 first. Our games should run as well as possible in NT, we won't
|require any '95 only features.
|
|Dos
|We are not going to do another dos game. No amount of flaming hate mail is
|going to change my mind on this (PLEASE don't!). The advantages of good
|TCP/IP support, dynamic linking, powerfull virtual memory, device drivers,
|etc, are just too much to overcome. Yes, all of those can be provided under
|dos in various ways, but it just isn't worth it.
|
|Linux
|I consider linux the second most important platform after win32 for id.
|From a biz standpoint it would be ludicrous to place it even on par with
|mac or os/2, but for our types of games that are designed to be hacked,
|linux has a big plus: the highest hacker to user ratio of any os. I don't
|personally develop on linux, because I do my unixy things with NEXTSTEP,
|but I have a lot of technical respect for it.
|
|MacOS
|From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
|and it doesn't matter all that much. We have professional ports done to
|MacOS instead of unsupported hack ports, which is a mixed blessing. They
|come out a lot later (still waiting for quake...), but are more full
|featured. I have zero respect for the MacOS on a technical basis. They just
|stood still and let microsoft run right over them from waaay behind. I
|wouldn't develop on it.
|
flm...@ibm.net
In <5h6i3r$s...@r02n01.cac.psu.edu>, er...@pobox.com (Eric Bennett) writes:
>In article <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>
>"Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes:
>
>> Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
>> systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
>> minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
>> religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
>> various operating systems moving forward.
>>
>[snip]
>> MacOS
>> From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
>> and it doesn't matter all that much. We have professional ports done to
>> MacOS instead of unsupported hack ports, which is a mixed blessing. They
>> come out a lot later (still waiting for quake...), but are more full
>> featured. I have zero respect for the MacOS on a technical basis. They just
>> stood still and let microsoft run right over them from waaay behind. I
>> wouldn't develop on it.
>
>Especially a *game* developer's viewpoint. Lack of PM is no fun for a
>developer. And as a games developer, I doubt he cares very much for
>the good Apple technologies like OT, ColorSync, and QuickDraw GX.
Sure its easy to disagree, even for a game developer. It isn't just OS/2 vs Windows,
its Java vs Windows. The news that Win97 won't be ready until 1998 will give
developers some time to investigate Java. Its is a write once run anywhere
concept that from a business perspective is persuasive. After the developer
has selected Java, all platforms are the target platform and the generally
accepted principle of developing on the target platform to cut down on testing
lab time no longer applies. Developers are then free to choose the best platform
for Java development. NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't
support 100% pure Java. This makes OS/2 or others better choices.
Tetsuji Ueda
flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>
> Sure its easy to disagree, even for a game developer. It isn't just OS/2 vs Windows,
> its Java vs Windows. The news that Win97 won't be ready until 1998 will give
> developers some time to investigate Java. Its is a write once run anywhere
> concept that from a business perspective is persuasive. After the developer
> has selected Java, all platforms are the target platform and the generally
> accepted principle of developing on the target platform to cut down on testing
> lab time no longer applies. Developers are then free to choose the best platform
> for Java development. NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't
> support 100% pure Java. This makes OS/2 or others better choices.
Ever program in Java? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Java to
displace native code. Java cross-platform is still marginal, some
things work on one platform and not on another. Add in slower
performance and then what do you have?
If you want 100% pure Java on Windows, why not install the Sun JDK? Why
would you have to change the OS?
Try using the current version JDK-1.1 and you'd find yourself rewriting
a lot of the classes to suit your needs. Java isn't ready for prime
time yet.
Regards,
Tetsuji Ueda
Adam Haun
On 25 Mar 1997 15:03:49 GMT, pcg...@ibm.net wrote:
>In <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes:
>|Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
>|systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
>|minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
>|religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
>|various operating systems moving forward.
>
>Judging from the comments below, it is easy to see how one makes lots
>of money programming games for teenage boys: think like a teenager.
The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being uninformed and
prejudiced...
>"Win32 rules the world" ??
From a marketing standpoint, yes.
>"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
>enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
OS/2 is in the extreme minority. How many games are for OS/2? What
would the performance be like?
>"MacOS
>From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
>and it doesn't matter all that much."
Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
performance.
>There's lots more in there; but, unless you ascribe to the Cult of
>Personality, there's not much meat. Just one more entrapeneur saying:
>"Show me the money!" Yawn
What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
kiy...@ibm.net
In <5h8pgl$3kq$2...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>, pcg...@ibm.net writes:
>In <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes:
>|Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
>|systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
>|minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
>|religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
>|various operating systems moving forward.
>
>Judging from the comments below, it is easy to see how one makes lots
>of money programming games for teenage boys: think like a teenager.
>
>"Win32 rules the world" ??
>
Hey, I didn't see anything about OS/390! What about CMS? I was on CMS
today for 4 hours. You should see VM/CMS haul on a watercooled 6 engine
ES9000.
>"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
>enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
>
>"MacOS
>From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
>and it doesn't matter all that much."
OS/390 doesn't matter? AIX doesn't matter. You can't make money with
OS/400?
This may be one of some industries brightest minds but it sure isn't the
computer industry.
Isn't he really playing in the Sony Playstation, Nintendo, Sega Saturn
market?
Isn't this just the 'Sonic the Hedgehog' market?
>
>There's lots more in there; but, unless you ascribe to the Cult of
>Personality, there's not much meat. Just one more entrapeneur saying:
>"Show me the money!" Yawn
>
Show me the 'game' money.
>Phil "Guido" Cava TeamOS/2
>Help, PC!
>Let us help you achieve Warp Speed today!
>email at: pcg...@ibm.net
>> Proud Member: Jeff Glatt OS/2 Zealots list, 01-MAR-97!
>
Cory Hamasaki Kiyo Design, Inc http://www.kiyoinc.com
HHResearch Co. 11 Annapolis St. OS/2 Webstore & Newsletter
REDWOOD Annapolis, Md, 21401 (410) 280-1942
Anthony D. Tribelli
Adam Haun (ka...@earthlink.net) wrote:
: Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
: Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
: performance.
The problem is not the Mac, it is the developer. Too many do a crappy
port. When a port is done correctly I've measured similar performance
between a P5-90 and a PPC601-66.
Tony
--
------------------
Tony Tribelli
adtri...@acm.org
Tim Smith
In article <5h8q2p$ke2$1...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>, <flm...@ibm.net> wrote:
>time no longer applies. Developers are then free to choose the best platform
>for Java development. NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't
>support 100% pure Java. This makes OS/2 or others better choices.
What Microsoft does or does not support is irrelevant, because Microsoft is
not the only company with a Java development system for Windows 95/NT (ever
heard of a company called "Sun" that is rumoured to have some familiarity
with Java?). (Also, any Microsoft extensions to Java in J++ are a superset
of what is available on other platforms, so you can still do your 100% pure
Java development with Microsoft's development system).
--Tim Smith
Raul
Eric Bennett wrote:
>
> In article <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>
> "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes:
>
> > Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
> > systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
> > minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
> > religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
> > various operating systems moving forward.
> >
> [snip]
> > MacOS
> > From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
> > MacOS instead of unsupported hack ports, which is a mixed blessing. They
> > come out a lot later (still waiting for quake...), but are more full
> > featured. I have zero respect for the MacOS on a technical basis. They just
> > stood still and let microsoft run right over them from waaay behind. I
> > wouldn't develop on it.
>
> Well, it's hard to disagree with him from a developer's viewpoint.
> Especially a *game* developer's viewpoint. Lack of PM is no fun for a
> developer. And as a games developer, I doubt he cares very much for
> the good Apple technologies like OT, ColorSync, and QuickDraw GX.
I understand games use more of private code and less and less of OS code
so as to optimize and speed up the game, therefore the OS is not an
issue
and your game can run on anything.
Funny that Quake apears on LINUX way before MAC and runs faster than a
DOS
run, so much for a 'hack', it runs better than anything else.
For games, OS is not an issue, the little OS dependent code u do is not
hard to do if you can make a game.
Scott Ashcraft
| Here in comp.os.os2.advocacy, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com>
| spake unto us, saying:
|
| >Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about
| >operating systems.
|
| Interesting comments. I find his honesty somewhat refreshing. :-)
|
I do wish he was a bit more honest about OS/2. He seems to think its OK
for others to port Quake to some of the smaller platforms, but not for
OS/2. He should just come out and say, "IBM screwed up big time on the
Doom/2 port, and we aren't going to give them another chance."
What is disappointing is that they apparently won't be doing any more DOS
games. That may end up backfiring on them.
scott ashcraft | email: ra4...@email.sps.mot.com
software engineer | ph. : +1.512.933.3916
motorola mos2 cim | team os/2 running wintel-free
| my opinions are my own
anti-spam enabled, remove @NOSPAM from my address when replying
flm...@ibm.net
In <3337FE1D...@math.unc.edu>, Tetsuji Ueda <ue...@math.unc.edu> writes:
>flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>>
>>Sure its easy to disagree, even for a game developer. It isn't
>>just OS/2 vs Windows, its Java vs Windows. The news that Win97
>>won't be ready until 1998 will give developers some time to
>>investigate Java. Its is a write once run anywhere concept that
>>from a business perspective is persuasive. After the developer
>>has selected Java, all platforms are the target platform and the
>>generally accepted principle of developing on the target platform
>>NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't support
>Ever program in Java? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Java to
>displace native code. Java cross-platform is still marginal, some
>things work on one platform and not on another. Add in slower
>performance and then what do you have?
You need to check out the Corel Office For Java product or the
Star Division Office product. Sun engineers believe Microsoft
is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
>If you want 100% pure Java on Windows, why not install the Sun JDK?
>Why would you have to change the OS?
Better testing. OS/2 includes the Netscape browser as well
as Win OS2. You are able to test the applet under both of the
popular browsers at no additional cost.
Cheeper Hardware. One of those old 486 machines you have
gathering dust can be turned into a fine Java development platform
with OS/2.
Faster Java execution. OS/2 includes Java and is one of the fastest
platforms for Java execution according to Corel.
>Try using the current version JDK-1.1 and you'd find yourself rewriting
>a lot of the classes to suit your needs. Java isn't ready for prime
>time yet.
I checked with Sun on that one. Corel has already ported the
Corel Office For Java product to JDK 1.1, apparently without
a lot of class rewriting. It would appear that as long as you are
using the proper 100% pure Java tools there is little problem in
porting from 1.02 to 1.1. This is a great example of why not to
use Win95 or NT based tools.
Regarding prime time. The Sun Workbench product and Visual
Basic to Java products are being demoed. IBM's VisualAge Java
product is about to be released. The NetRexx beta converts
Rexx to Java. Almost all DBMS systems can be accessed with the
JDK 1.1. IMO JTAPI has already replaced TAPI. I wouldn't
propose any project at this point in time that didn't include at least
a Java pilot. Network Computers are right around the corner and
all will use Java. Some will run games and be WebTV like.
They will likely be ready before Xmas. Attend one of thoes
Java conferences. The seminars I attend seem to have a lot of
folks developing products for the consumer NC (WebTV)
market. I am guessing that they are games but haven't asked.
In any case, I wouldn't purchase any new development tools
that weren't Java based at this point in time.
Eric Bennett
In article <33395D49...@math.unc.edu>
Tetsuji Ueda <ue...@math.unc.edu> writes:
> > You need to check out the Corel Office For Java product or the
> > Star Division Office product. Sun engineers believe Microsoft
> > is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
>
> You're kidding right? I downloaded the Corel Office for Java a while
> back to check it out. They practically rewrote the whole damn ui
> classes. And running it with Sun's VM sucks up mongo memory. And it's
> slow. And it's nowhere near being as full-featured as Corel Office in
> native code. So where's the advantage? Why would Microsoft port to
> Java? So they can sell Unix versions?
So it will run slower. Maybe MS has run out of ways to make software
slow and now they're borrowing ideas from elsewhere.
--
Eric Bennett ( er...@pobox.com ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )
Microsoft: for those of you who don't want to go anywhere today.
Tetsuji Ueda
flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>
> >Ever program in Java? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Java to
> >displace native code. Java cross-platform is still marginal, some
> >things work on one platform and not on another. Add in slower
> >performance and then what do you have?
>
> Star Division Office product. Sun engineers believe Microsoft
> is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
You're kidding right? I downloaded the Corel Office for Java a while
back to check it out. They practically rewrote the whole damn ui
classes. And running it with Sun's VM sucks up mongo memory. And it's
slow. And it's nowhere near being as full-featured as Corel Office in
native code. So where's the advantage? Why would Microsoft port to
Java? So they can sell Unix versions? I doubt it.
> >If you want 100% pure Java on Windows, why not install the Sun JDK?
> >Why would you have to change the OS?
>
> Better testing. OS/2 includes the Netscape browser as well
> as Win OS2. You are able to test the applet under both of the
> popular browsers at no additional cost.
Yeah I forgot. You can't get Netscape on Windows machines. Just not
available, eh? And you're telling me all these Java programs are going
to be applets? You can't do hardly anything with applets, other than
show pretty pictures and act as a dumb terminal.
> Cheeper Hardware. One of those old 486 machines you have
> gathering dust can be turned into a fine Java development platform
> with OS/2.
Try programming Java on a cheap machine with small memory. Just try
it. I wouldn't call it "fine". I bet you haven't tried it.
> Faster Java execution. OS/2 includes Java and is one of the fastest
> platforms for Java execution according to Corel.
Not any more.
> >Try using the current version JDK-1.1 and you'd find yourself rewriting
> >a lot of the classes to suit your needs. Java isn't ready for prime
> >time yet.
>
> I checked with Sun on that one. Corel has already ported the
> Corel Office For Java product to JDK 1.1, apparently without
> a lot of class rewriting. It would appear that as long as you are
> using the proper 100% pure Java tools there is little problem in
> porting from 1.02 to 1.1. This is a great example of why not to
> use Win95 or NT based tools.
I'm not talking about porting from 1.02 to 1.1. Corel rewrote much of
the UI just so they'll have Java working across several platforms
consistently. And performance is still sucks. So is the memory
requirements. And why not use Windows tools? Who says you have to use
Microsoft tools for Java on Windows. BTW, there are more Java tools
from more companies on Windows than for any other platform.
> Regarding prime time. The Sun Workbench product and Visual
> Basic to Java products are being demoed. IBM's VisualAge Java
> product is about to be released. The NetRexx beta converts
> Rexx to Java. Almost all DBMS systems can be accessed with the
> JDK 1.1. IMO JTAPI has already replaced TAPI. I wouldn't
> propose any project at this point in time that didn't include at least
> a Java pilot. Network Computers are right around the corner and
> all will use Java. Some will run games and be WebTV like.
> They will likely be ready before Xmas. Attend one of thoes
> Java conferences. The seminars I attend seem to have a lot of
> folks developing products for the consumer NC (WebTV)
> market. I am guessing that they are games but haven't asked.
>
> In any case, I wouldn't purchase any new development tools
> that weren't Java based at this point in time.
Try some of these development tools before popping off about how all
things are going to be Java in the future. You'll agree that Java is
not ready yet for prime time. Besides server/client applications and
WWW (and that's pretty much the examples you come up with which are
reasonable), why would anyone even bother? Cool. Java, the language of
dumb terminals.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Java games beyond Yet-Another-Pong.
Regards,
Tetsuji Ueda
Tetsuji Ueda
Eric Bennett wrote:
>
> > > You need to check out the Corel Office For Java product or the
> > > Star Division Office product. Sun engineers believe Microsoft
> > > is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
> >
> > You're kidding right? I downloaded the Corel Office for Java a while
> > back to check it out. They practically rewrote the whole damn ui
> > classes. And running it with Sun's VM sucks up mongo memory. And it's
> > slow. And it's nowhere near being as full-featured as Corel Office in
> > native code. So where's the advantage? Why would Microsoft port to
> > Java? So they can sell Unix versions?
>
> slow and now they're borrowing ideas from elsewhere.
That's crazy. It'll mean going through Java Applets for Internet
integration. What'll happen to the convenience of erasing your hard
disk by looking at a remote Web page?
That seems a bit too secure for Microsoft's tastes.
Regards,
Tetsuji Ueda
Adam Haun
On Tue, 25 Mar 1997 20:25:29 GMT, a...@netcom.com (Anthony D. Tribelli)
wrote:
>Adam Haun (ka...@earthlink.net) wrote:
>: Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
>: Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
>: performance.
>
>The problem is not the Mac, it is the developer. Too many do a crappy
>port. When a port is done correctly I've measured similar performance
>between a P5-90 and a PPC601-66.
But they won't DO a port at all, so it doesn't matter anyway.
Anthony D. Tribelli
Adam Haun (ka...@earthlink.net) wrote:
A real-world counter example: A company did a port last year, sales are
about 50-100K units, over twice what the publisher expected. This year the
publisher contracts the company to do three DOS/Win95 ports.
Profits is profits, Mac money is just as good as PC money.
Arun Gupta
>(Also, any Microsoft extensions to Java in J++ are a superset
>of what is available on other platforms, so you can still do your 100% pure
>Java development with Microsoft's development system).
And what mechanism is provided in the development system to avoid using
Microsoft extensions to Java ?
-arun gupta
Steven C. Den Beste
Adam Haun wrote:
>
> What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
> gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
You're looking at it from the point of view of someone running the
program. He's looking at it from the point of view of someone *writing*
the program and *supporting* the program.
DOS may have decent performance, but it is a pain to develop for and
even worse to support. He makes that clear. The reason is driver
support.
In DOS, the developer is completely responsible for supporting the
gazillions of different boards out there, not to mention all the
combinatorial problems that develop. In WIN32, all the drivers are
installed, and the developer deals with a standard API. From the point
of view of a developer, this is a major improvement.
joseph
-- joseph
On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Steven C. Den Beste wrote:
> Adam Haun wrote:
> >
> > What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
> > gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>
> You're looking at it from the point of view of someone running the
> program. He's looking at it from the point of view of someone *writing*
> the program and *supporting* the program.
I think he made the case for a good API which is not exclusive to DOS.
In fact the guy hates DirectX and likes OpenGL.
DOS can and does support standard video modes which are generic and fast.
In fact the new Network Computer paradigm running on old DOS 486 system in
8MB will PROBABLY use standard VGA and suger VGA modes. A more common
example are the VGA modes of Quattro PRO DOS and the file preview in
WordPerfect.
The only problem I see is that the industry has not been agressive in
establishing advanced video modes for DOS. I think VESA has some more
recent standards out at 1024 x 768 and I think Chris Robato has made the
case that many new PC games are being written to DOS using these standard
modes. In fact has he not made the case that Win95 is losing development
to DOS?
> DOS may have decent performance, but it is a pain to develop for and
> even worse to support. He makes that clear. The reason is driver
> support.
VGA and SVGA are standard modes on all cards. Driver support on windows
can vary with ID selecting OpenGL because DirectX is so bad. OpenGL can
be hosted on DOS. The problem is who has done it?
> In DOS, the developer is completely responsible for supporting the
> gazillions of different boards out there, not to mention all the
> combinatorial problems that develop. In WIN32, all the drivers are
> installed, and the developer deals with a standard API. From the point
> of view of a developer, this is a major improvement.
You are not correct. Each of the gazillion baords has to support the
standard video modes defined by the industry so the developer has a well
defined set of APIs to use. Try previewing a document in Wordperfect 5.1
on DOS and see the VGA driver work on your new ard -- not unique support
required.
The windows OSs, like OS/2 have a device driver. Win32 has none. It's not
correct to imply that the device driver is the Win32 API.
Writting to a standard is good, like the SVGA standard or a windows or
OS/2 virtual device. Device drivers do not make the development easier in
real world settings over say a DOS/video library developer using VESA's
standards. Each driver is written by a different company -- no more
reliable than say their support for standard video modes.
These drivers can and do have bugs to the extend that the developer HAS to
worry about them. I can tell you that the developers stick to the
standard SVGA drivers by MS when doing program devleopment. I have used
Win-OS2 to debug video driver related bugs in windows programs. Win-os2
has it's own unqiue set of drivers so I have a system that can help detect
driver and or program bugs.
When shippping products most support calls revolve around bad drivers -
video and printer. In some cases entire programs are hacked to work
around a driver bug in say the HP printer drivers. I've seen it happen.
I've had to print files under AMI PRO/2 simply becasue the windows PS
drivers had bugs.
Chris Trimble
Adam Haun wrote:
> The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being
> uninformed and prejudiced...
I hope you meant at _most_ 20-25. The median -- even the mean -- gamer
age definitely doesn't lie in the 30-35 range; that simply is a number
that is obviously not representative of our society. Any trip to the
arcade or software shop will back up that thought. I don't have data to
give you an "accurate" number, but if you actually have data to back up
your statistic, I'd really like to take a look at it; I believe it must
be deeply flawed.
> What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the
> only major gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
I don't think ID did ditch DOS. Maybe they will someday, but they
haven't yet. I think they're just using NT as their development
platform. It's simply a great OS for having the debugger up while
you're crash testing your stuff.
- Chris
Tim Smith
> What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
> gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>
Win 95, OS/2, and NT *do* *not* suck performance like a vacuum.
E.g., doing "timerefresh" from the start in Quake with my default setup
on my P133 with Diamond Stealth 64 Video, using the drivers that come with
the OS, if any, I got these numbers for two timerefreshes back to back:
DOS: 23.71 fps, 23.79 fps (Quake.exe 1.07)
W95: 22.95 fps, 23.06 fps (Quake.exe 1.07)
OS/2: 22.32 fps, 23.33 fps (Quake.exe 1.07)
NT: 22.57 ftp, 22.72 fps (WinQuake .992)
(I don't happen to have Linux Quake, which is why I didn't include it.
I didn't use WinQuake on Windows 95 because it didn't have the video mode
I wanted).
Yes, DOS is fastest, but not be enough to be worth rebooting for, or even
noticable except by benchmarking. Carmack is not giving up significant
performance by dropping DOS, so the only question for Carmack is whether or
not the sales to people who have DOS only is worth the development and support
time.
--Tim Smith
Joe Ragosta
In article <adtE7M...@netcom.com>, a...@netcom.com (Anthony D. Tribelli)
wrote:
> Adam Haun (ka...@earthlink.net) wrote:
> : Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
> : Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
> : performance.
>
> The problem is not the Mac, it is the developer. Too many do a crappy
> port. When a port is done correctly I've measured similar performance
> between a P5-90 and a PPC601-66.
If you have any published results (even on the web), I'd appreciate seeing
them. I'm keeping track of performance comparisons on my web site.
Your performance is pretty typical. A 66 MHz 601 in general does match a
P5-90 on most commercial apps.
--
Regards,
Joe Ragosta
joe.r...@dol.net
See the Complete Macintosh Advocacy Site
http://www.dol.net/~Ragosta/complmac.htm
cro...@kuentos.guam.net
In <adtE7M...@netcom.com>, a...@netcom.com (Anthony D. Tribelli) writes:
>Adam Haun (ka...@earthlink.net) wrote:
>: Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
>: Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
>: performance.
Anyone who says this has not really seen a Mac game.
>
>The problem is not the Mac, it is the developer. Too many do a crappy
>port. When a port is done correctly I've measured similar performance
>between a P5-90 and a PPC601-66.
If the games on the PC are done properly, they are on DOS. They get
their speed from accessing hardware directly, which you can't do on
Win95 or MacOS. Win95 games have been disappointingly slow for me, and
the MacOS games generally run faster assuming a rough equivalancy on the
clock speed. Depends a lot on the PC video card as well, some has very
fast DOS access and page flipping. Older Macs have no page flipping,
but many of the newer Macs do, with very fast page flipping and
Quickdraw or Toolkit acceleration, while running 40 or 50Mhz 64 bit
buses to the onboard video memory, faster than the PC's 32 bit 33MHz PCI
bus to the video. PowerPCs also outperform Pentiums on both integer and
floating point.
Rgds,
Chris
Famous People on the Day Windows 95 is Launched---
Neil Armstrong---"One Small Fortune for Bill Gates,
One Giant Leap backward for Mankind."
President Roosevelt---"This date shall live in infamy."
*** cro...@kuentos.guam.net *** TKS for the Contributions.
Erik Funkenbusch
In article <Pine.SGI.3.96.970326153609.19857A-100000@earth_systems.monterey.edu>, joseph <coughlan@earth_systems.monterey.edu> wrote:
>
>
>-- joseph
>
>On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Steven C. Den Beste wrote:
>
>> Adam Haun wrote:
>> >
>> > gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>>
>> program. He's looking at it from the point of view of someone *writing*
>> the program and *supporting* the program.
>
>I think he made the case for a good API which is not exclusive to DOS.
>In fact the guy hates DirectX and likes OpenGL.
Umm.. no. John Carmack has made a point of not likeing Direct3d, he has not
stated he didn't like DirectX. Direct3d is a part of DirectX, but you don't
have to use Direct3d to use DirectX.
>DOS can and does support standard video modes which are generic and fast.
>In fact the new Network Computer paradigm running on old DOS 486 system in
>8MB will PROBABLY use standard VGA and suger VGA modes. A more common
>example are the VGA modes of Quattro PRO DOS and the file preview in
>WordPerfect.
There are basically only 2 video modes that game developers can count on in
Dos for games. Basically, those modes suck.
>The only problem I see is that the industry has not been agressive in
>establishing advanced video modes for DOS. I think VESA has some more
>recent standards out at 1024 x 768 and I think Chris Robato has made the
>case that many new PC games are being written to DOS using these standard
>modes. In fact has he not made the case that Win95 is losing development
>to DOS?
Yes, VESA has these modes, but they are not supported by all cards (even
today) and even less so on older cards.
>> DOS may have decent performance, but it is a pain to develop for and
>> even worse to support. He makes that clear. The reason is driver
>> support.
>
>VGA and SVGA are standard modes on all cards. Driver support on windows
>can vary with ID selecting OpenGL because DirectX is so bad. OpenGL can
>be hosted on DOS. The problem is who has done it?
Huh? VGA is indeed a standard mode. But that's 640x480 at 16 colors. That's
it. That's all VGA is. SVGA is *NOT* a standard. If it was, the SVGA driver
in windows would work with any card. It doesn't, not even close.
OpenGL is a graphics library, it is not a display library. ID *HAS* selected
DirectX for Win32 display services. They have *NOT* selected Direct3d for 3d
rendering, but are prefering to use OpenGL right now. DirectX and OpenGL are
two different things, with only one subset of DirectX supporting similar
functionality as OpenGL. OpenGL cannot write directly to display hardware,
OpenGL cannot manage palettes, do frame buffering, offer standard sound
services such as 3d stereo and wave effects, obtain input from various
devices, or use a network for transfering information.
>> In DOS, the developer is completely responsible for supporting the
>> gazillions of different boards out there, not to mention all the
>> combinatorial problems that develop. In WIN32, all the drivers are
>> installed, and the developer deals with a standard API. From the point
>> of view of a developer, this is a major improvement.
>
>You are not correct. Each of the gazillion baords has to support the
>standard video modes defined by the industry so the developer has a well
>defined set of APIs to use. Try previewing a document in Wordperfect 5.1
>on DOS and see the VGA driver work on your new ard -- not unique support
>required.
>
>The windows OSs, like OS/2 have a device driver. Win32 has none. It's not
>correct to imply that the device driver is the Win32 API.
Win32 now has a driver model called the Win32 Driver model. This allows all
Win32 OS's to use the same drivers.
>Writting to a standard is good, like the SVGA standard or a windows or
>OS/2 virtual device. Device drivers do not make the development easier in
>real world settings over say a DOS/video library developer using VESA's
>standards. Each driver is written by a different company -- no more
>reliable than say their support for standard video modes.
Again, there *IS NO* SVGA standard.
>These drivers can and do have bugs to the extend that the developer HAS to
>worry about them. I can tell you that the developers stick to the
>standard SVGA drivers by MS when doing program devleopment. I have used
>Win-OS2 to debug video driver related bugs in windows programs. Win-os2
>has it's own unqiue set of drivers so I have a system that can help detect
>driver and or program bugs.
>
>When shippping products most support calls revolve around bad drivers -
>video and printer. In some cases entire programs are hacked to work
>around a driver bug in say the HP printer drivers. I've seen it happen.
>
>I've had to print files under AMI PRO/2 simply becasue the windows PS
>drivers had bugs.
This I agree with, but there is no difference between bugs in a driver and
bugs in the hardware.
Erik Funkenbusch
In article <5hbilo$f60$1...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>, flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>In <3337FE1D...@math.unc.edu>, Tetsuji Ueda <ue...@math.unc.edu> writes:
>>flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>>>
>>>Sure its easy to disagree, even for a game developer. It isn't
>>>just OS/2 vs Windows, its Java vs Windows. The news that Win97
>>>won't be ready until 1998 will give developers some time to
>>>investigate Java. Its is a write once run anywhere concept that
>>>from a business perspective is persuasive. After the developer
>>>has selected Java, all platforms are the target platform and the
>>>generally accepted principle of developing on the target platform
>>>to cut down on testing lab time no longer applies. Developers
>>>are then free to choose the best platform for Java development.
>>>NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't support
>>>100% pure Java. This makes OS/2, solaris or others better choices.
>
>>displace native code. Java cross-platform is still marginal, some
>>things work on one platform and not on another. Add in slower
>>performance and then what do you have?
>
>Star Division Office product. Sun engineers believe Microsoft
>is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
Is Corel Office For Java done? Last I saw there was a cheesy demo that was
slow, did little and didn't work very well.
>>If you want 100% pure Java on Windows, why not install the Sun JDK?
>>Why would you have to change the OS?
>
>Better testing. OS/2 includes the Netscape browser as well
>as Win OS2. You are able to test the applet under both of the
>popular browsers at no additional cost.
>
>Cheeper Hardware. One of those old 486 machines you have
>gathering dust can be turned into a fine Java development platform
>with OS/2.
>
>Faster Java execution. OS/2 includes Java and is one of the fastest
>platforms for Java execution according to Corel.
Hmm.. According to Sun MS's implementation is the fastest... which is correct?
>>Try using the current version JDK-1.1 and you'd find yourself rewriting
>>a lot of the classes to suit your needs. Java isn't ready for prime
>>time yet.
>
>I checked with Sun on that one. Corel has already ported the
>Corel Office For Java product to JDK 1.1, apparently without
>a lot of class rewriting. It would appear that as long as you are
>using the proper 100% pure Java tools there is little problem in
>porting from 1.02 to 1.1. This is a great example of why not to
>use Win95 or NT based tools.
Why? You mean you can't use Sun's Java Workshop (which runs on NT and 95)?
You can't use Symantec or borlands Java? Hmm.. How about IBM's Visual Age
Java for Win32 (which is available in beta).
And for the record, Visual J++ *DOES* support 100% Java. It also supports
other things as well. It's a superset.
>Regarding prime time. The Sun Workbench product and Visual
>Basic to Java products are being demoed. IBM's VisualAge Java
>product is about to be released. The NetRexx beta converts
>Rexx to Java. Almost all DBMS systems can be accessed with the
>JDK 1.1. IMO JTAPI has already replaced TAPI. I wouldn't
>propose any project at this point in time that didn't include at least
>a Java pilot. Network Computers are right around the corner and
>all will use Java. Some will run games and be WebTV like.
>They will likely be ready before Xmas. Attend one of thoes
>Java conferences. The seminars I attend seem to have a lot of
>folks developing products for the consumer NC (WebTV)
>market. I am guessing that they are games but haven't asked.
>
>In any case, I wouldn't purchase any new development tools
>that weren't Java based at this point in time.
Why? development tools are on a 9 month cycle or so. Developers replace them
every nine months. If you don't plan on doing java development within the
next 9 months there's no point in buying that support today.
br...@anv.net
>Huh? VGA is indeed a standard mode. But that's 640x480 at 16 colors. That's
>it. That's all VGA is. SVGA is *NOT* a standard. If it was, the SVGA driver
>in windows would work with any card. It doesn't, not even close.
If it doesn't work with any card it isn't a standard? Gosh, VGA
doesn't work on EGA cards, so...
<snip>
>Again, there *IS NO* SVGA standard.
Tell that to the folks at VESA (www.vesa.org).
Eric Bennett
In article <33397D57...@math.unc.edu>
Tetsuji Ueda <ue...@math.unc.edu> writes:
> > So it will run slower. Maybe MS has run out of ways to make software
> > slow and now they're borrowing ideas from elsewhere.
>
> That's crazy. It'll mean going through Java Applets for Internet
> integration. What'll happen to the convenience of erasing your hard
> disk by looking at a remote Web page?
>
> That seems a bit too secure for Microsoft's tastes.
Don't worry. They could easily introduce security bugs when they add
their Windows-specific Java extensions.
Michael Hermann
In article <33395D49...@math.unc.edu>, Tetsuji Ueda <ue...@math.unc.edu> writes:
|> flm...@ibm.net wrote:
|> >
|> > >Ever program in Java? I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Java to
|> > >displace native code. Java cross-platform is still marginal, some
|> > >things work on one platform and not on another. Add in slower
|> > >performance and then what do you have?
|> >
|> > You need to check out the Corel Office For Java product or the
|> > Star Division Office product. Sun engineers believe Microsoft
|> > is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
|>
|> back to check it out. They practically rewrote the whole damn ui
|> classes. And running it with Sun's VM sucks up mongo memory. And it's
|> slow. And it's nowhere near being as full-featured as Corel Office in
|> native code. So where's the advantage? Why would Microsoft port to
I agree, the Corel Office for java is the wrong way. Star is using the right
way. They created an Office Server which runs under UNIX, Windows, OS/2 and
probably some others and an Office Frontend, which is written in Java and
< 400k in size.
From what I've heard this beast is pretty fast and blows away Corel Office.
There of course also are native versions of their Office.
MS is rumored to port their Office to Java (was in the news a few days ago).
They don't say either way though.
|> > >If you want 100% pure Java on Windows, why not install the Sun JDK?
|> > >Why would you have to change the OS?
|> >
|> > Better testing. OS/2 includes the Netscape browser as well
|> > as Win OS2. You are able to test the applet under both of the
|> > popular browsers at no additional cost.
|>
|> Yeah I forgot. You can't get Netscape on Windows machines. Just not
|> available, eh? And you're telling me all these Java programs are going
|> to be applets? You can't do hardly anything with applets, other than
|> show pretty pictures and act as a dumb terminal.
They probably will be apps...
|> > Cheeper Hardware. One of those old 486 machines you have
|> > gathering dust can be turned into a fine Java development platform
|> > with OS/2.
|>
|> Try programming Java on a cheap machine with small memory. Just try
|> it. I wouldn't call it "fine". I bet you haven't tried it.
Actually I do have a 486DX2-66 with 20MB RAM and it works nicely (I still
will upgrade soon..).
If you drop the underlying OS and replace it with the JavaOS from Sun it
should certainly speed things up, at least that is what you hear in the
mags.
|> > Faster Java execution. OS/2 includes Java and is one of the fastest
|> > platforms for Java execution according to Corel.
|>
|> Not any more.
Care to elaborate ?
|> > >Try using the current version JDK-1.1 and you'd find yourself rewriting
|> > >a lot of the classes to suit your needs. Java isn't ready for prime
|> > >time yet.
|> >
|> > I checked with Sun on that one. Corel has already ported the
|> > Corel Office For Java product to JDK 1.1, apparently without
|> > a lot of class rewriting. It would appear that as long as you are
|> > using the proper 100% pure Java tools there is little problem in
|> > porting from 1.02 to 1.1. This is a great example of why not to
|> > use Win95 or NT based tools.
|>
|> I'm not talking about porting from 1.02 to 1.1. Corel rewrote much of
|> the UI just so they'll have Java working across several platforms
|> consistently. And performance is still sucks. So is the memory
|> requirements. And why not use Windows tools? Who says you have to use
|> Microsoft tools for Java on Windows. BTW, there are more Java tools
|> from more companies on Windows than for any other platform.
which is only logical. Windows is the biggest market for most things.
|> > Regarding prime time. The Sun Workbench product and Visual
|> > Basic to Java products are being demoed. IBM's VisualAge Java
|> > product is about to be released. The NetRexx beta converts
|> > Rexx to Java. Almost all DBMS systems can be accessed with the
|> > JDK 1.1. IMO JTAPI has already replaced TAPI. I wouldn't
|> > propose any project at this point in time that didn't include at least
|> > a Java pilot. Network Computers are right around the corner and
|> > all will use Java. Some will run games and be WebTV like.
|> > They will likely be ready before Xmas. Attend one of thoes
|> > Java conferences. The seminars I attend seem to have a lot of
|> > folks developing products for the consumer NC (WebTV)
|> > market. I am guessing that they are games but haven't asked.
|> >
|> > In any case, I wouldn't purchase any new development tools
|> > that weren't Java based at this point in time.
|>
|> Try some of these development tools before popping off about how all
|> things are going to be Java in the future. You'll agree that Java is
|> not ready yet for prime time. Besides server/client applications and
|> WWW (and that's pretty much the examples you come up with which are
|> reasonable), why would anyone even bother? Cool. Java, the language of
|> dumb terminals.
I will take a look at some Java compilers, Symantec Visual Cafe seems
interesting (and AFAIK it can compile your code, not just to bytecode
but as any other compiler, which gives you native speed on Windows
and a portable program).
|> Don't hold your breath waiting for Java games beyond Yet-Another-Pong.
I already have seen some which are a lot better than Pong. OTOH I won't
hold my breath for state of the art action games...
-Mike
pcg...@ibm.net
In <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net (Adam Haun) writes:
|On 25 Mar 1997 15:03:49 GMT, pcg...@ibm.net wrote:
|
|||minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
|||religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
|||various operating systems moving forward.
||
||of money programming games for teenage boys: think like a teenager.
|
|prejudiced...
Apparently you are too young to think like an adult; but, no longer
a teenager either. How sad for you. 30-35 year olds who still exhibit
many of the attributes of teen age boys are not uncommon, now are they?
Sports Bars. Computers as video game stations. BMW's with automatic
transmissions. You get the picture.
||"Win32 rules the world" ??
|
|From a marketing standpoint, yes.
Well, take your MBA outside to play with it, OK? I'm sure there must be
marketing ng's somewhere out there on Usenet; but, I didn't notice any
in this posting's header...
||"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
||enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
|
|OS/2 is in the extreme minority. How many games are for OS/2? What
|would the performance be like?
OS/2 outnumbers NT by something in the area of 5-10x. OS/2 clients
outnumber NT clients by more like 20x. There are numerous games for
OS/2, however, they do not tend to be in the max testosterone category;
so, you probably wouldn't know they even exist. As for performance,
OS/2 excels are providing robust multi-tasking & multi-threading - it
does not require a system setting to favor the focus app extrodinarily
to provide that performance as does NT.
||"MacOS
||From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
||and it doesn't matter all that much."
|
|Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
|Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
|performance.
Oh Gee, game performance is the only measure you have for the foremost
graphics arts environment? Grow up. The same goes for Mr Carmack.
Of course, at least he's _making_ money from his insight's into the
teenage psyche (as exhibited by teen agers of all ages <G>).
||There's lots more in there; but, unless you ascribe to the Cult of
||Personality, there's not much meat. Just one more entrapeneur saying:
||"Show me the money!" Yawn
|
|What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
|gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
Try Linux for real efficiency. DOS acheives it's performance by simply
stepping out of the way. A good programmer can acheive miracles in
DOS, a poor one can create The Monster Who Devoured Cleveland in record
time.
Adam Haun
On Thu, 27 Mar 1997 02:55:03 GMT, chu...@isd.net (Erik Funkenbusch)
wrote:
>In article <Pine.SGI.3.96.970326153609.19857A-100000@earth_systems.monterey.edu>, joseph <coughlan@earth_systems.monterey.edu> wrote:
>>
>>
>>-- joseph
>>
>>On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Steven C. Den Beste wrote:
>>
>>> Adam Haun wrote:
>>> >
>>> > What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
>>> > gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>>>
>>> You're looking at it from the point of view of someone running the
>>> program. He's looking at it from the point of view of someone *writing*
>>> the program and *supporting* the program.
The end user is who really matters though, right?
>>I think he made the case for a good API which is not exclusive to DOS.
>>In fact the guy hates DirectX and likes OpenGL.
Too bad it doesn't quite work all the way yet. In the GLQuake docs it
says that you can expect severely low FPS unless you have a very
expensive GL compatible video card.
>Umm.. no. John Carmack has made a point of not likeing Direct3d, he has not
>stated he didn't like DirectX. Direct3d is a part of DirectX, but you don't
>have to use Direct3d to use DirectX.
>
>>DOS can and does support standard video modes which are generic and fast.
>>In fact the new Network Computer paradigm running on old DOS 486 system in
>>8MB will PROBABLY use standard VGA and suger VGA modes. A more common
>>example are the VGA modes of Quattro PRO DOS and the file preview in
>>WordPerfect.
>
>There are basically only 2 video modes that game developers can count on in
>Dos for games. Basically, those modes suck.
Really? Ever heard of VBE 1.2 and 2.0? I wouldn't call 640x480x256,
800x600x256, and 1024x768x256 bad(and 1280x1024, etc.). Plus more with
VBE 2.0. I *think* that more colors are supported, but due to
performance issues they haven't been widely done except on 3d
accelerated games.
>>The only problem I see is that the industry has not been agressive in
>>establishing advanced video modes for DOS. I think VESA has some more
>>recent standards out at 1024 x 768 and I think Chris Robato has made the
>>case that many new PC games are being written to DOS using these standard
>>modes. In fact has he not made the case that Win95 is losing development
>>to DOS?
>
>Yes, VESA has these modes, but they are not supported by all cards (even
>today) and even less so on older cards.
That's why you run UNIVBE. Which is included with the game.
>>> DOS may have decent performance, but it is a pain to develop for and
>>> even worse to support. He makes that clear. The reason is driver
>>> support.
>>
>>VGA and SVGA are standard modes on all cards. Driver support on windows
>>can vary with ID selecting OpenGL because DirectX is so bad. OpenGL can
>>be hosted on DOS. The problem is who has done it?
>
>Huh? VGA is indeed a standard mode. But that's 640x480 at 16 colors. That's
>it. That's all VGA is. SVGA is *NOT* a standard. If it was, the SVGA driver
>in windows would work with any card. It doesn't, not even close.
It's called an SVGA video card, and it has been out for a number of
years now.
If the programmer uses something like the SciTech MGL graphcis
library, they get universal video card support without having to
recode.
Arun Gupta
In article <5hd74p$prk$1...@halcyon.com>, Tim Smith <t...@halcyon.com> wrote:
>Arun Gupta <gu...@tlctest.mt.att.com.> wrote:
>>>(Also, any Microsoft extensions to Java in J++ are a superset
>>>of what is available on other platforms, so you can still do your 100% pure
>>>Java development with Microsoft's development system).
>>
>>And what mechanism is provided in the development system to avoid using
>>Microsoft extensions to Java ?
>
>Only type things that you find in your Sun Java manuals. If you can't
>figure that out, you should be programming in BASIC, not Java.
1.
I do not program for a living.
2.
Presumably one will have a J++ manual when working with J++ and
you imagine this person will constantly cross-reference to Sun's
Java manual. Rather inefficient solution, IMO.
3.
What if Microsoft has got its order of dependency inverted -- i.e.,
something in the Sun set of classes depends on one of the Microsoft
extensions ?
-arun gupta
Eric Bennett
In article <5hd74p$prk$1...@halcyon.com>
t...@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) writes:
> >And what mechanism is provided in the development system to avoid using
> >Microsoft extensions to Java ?
>
> Only type things that you find in your Sun Java manuals. If you can't
> figure that out, you should be programming in BASIC, not Java.
I know of at least one old Pascal compiler that had platform-specific
extensions as well as a compiler flag you could set to tell it whether
or not to enforce rigid ISO standards or to allow the platform-specific
enhancements...
Dave Taylor
I'm totally in John's camp on Rhapsody. Mac hardware is *cool*, but we
won't make another game for MacOS. It goes beyond the OS & development
tools.
This Christmas, retailers refused to stock new Mac product. Several
publishers went ape-shit and went to Apple to get something done. I
haven't heard of any progress yet. That meant that Mac Abuse was not
sold in stores, even though it got a good reception from players.
Pissed me off somethin' fierce.
But hey, MacOS? Win32? Who cares? My proudest moment will be
releasing Golgotha for Linux. :)
=-ddt->
Scott Ashcraft
In article <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net
(Adam Haun) wrote:
|
| The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being uninformed and
| prejudiced...
Really? Where do you get your information?
|
| >"Win32 rules the world" ??
|
| From a marketing standpoint, yes.
Actually, Win3.1 installations still outnumber Win95/NT installations.
|
| >"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
| >enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
|
| OS/2 is in the extreme minority. How many games are for OS/2? What
| would the performance be like?
Extreme minority? I would hazard a guess that OS/2 installations outnumber
Linux by a wide margin. There aren't a lot of games for OS/2, mainly
because DOS games seem to work fine.
Why would performance be any less than Win95 or NT?
|
| What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
| gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
I agree fully. Besides, with one DOS version, you cover Win95, Win3.1 and OS/2.
Brian Kimball
Tim Smith wrote:
>
> Arun Gupta <gu...@tlctest.mt.att.com.> wrote:
> >>(Also, any Microsoft extensions to Java in J++ are a superset
> >>of what is available on other platforms, so you can still do your 100% pure
> >>Java development with Microsoft's development system).
> >
> >Microsoft extensions to Java ?
>
> Only type things that you find in your Sun Java manuals. If you can't
> figure that out, you should be programming in BASIC, not Java.
M$ is also rewriting the standard java API for their own systems. So
they might have the same class names & method names, but internally they
work differently. Or so I hear. Anyways, calm down and stop being an
ass. There's no need to curse BASIC on anyone.
kimball
flm...@ibm.net
In <slrn5jir1u....@c00567-1403br.eos.ncsu.edu>, exf...@rbf.apfh.rqh (Ravi K. Swamy) writes:
>In article <5hbilo$f60$1...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>, flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>>>flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>>>>
>>>>just OS/2 vs Windows, its Java vs Windows. The news that Win97
>>>>won't be ready until 1998 will give developers some time to
>>>>investigate Java. Its is a write once run anywhere concept that
>>>>from a business perspective is persuasive. After the developer
>>>>has selected Java, all platforms are the target platform and the
>>>>generally accepted principle of developing on the target platform
>>>>to cut down on testing lab time no longer applies. Developers
>>>>are then free to choose the best platform for Java development.
>>>>NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't support
>>>>100% pure Java. This makes OS/2, solaris or others better choices.
>>
>>>displace native code. Java cross-platform is still marginal, some
>>>things work on one platform and not on another. Add in slower
>>>performance and then what do you have?
>>
>>You need to check out the Corel Office For Java product or the
>>Star Division Office product.
>
>current web page lists that it works with any web browser or
>Sun's JDK, it sure didn't work with Netscape on HP-UX 3 months
>ago. Started up, chewed up tons of swap and then died. Sure it
>will improve but it'll be a while before it is ready for everyday
>use.
Agreed, but you can use the win 3.11, Win95 or WinNT version in the
mean time, and it has stopped sales of Microsoft Office
>
>> Sun engineers believe Microsoft
>>is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
>
>Where did you get this fabulous scoop? Sun? Rather than replace
>Office code with Java code MS should concentrate on replacing
>its employees with actual programmers.
The rumor was published by Nicholas Petreley in Infoworld and It may
well be true. Microsoft can, will and does turn on a dime when they
realize a product is doing poorly and Office 97 is doing poorly.
>
>>propose any project at this point in time that didn't include at least
>>a Java pilot. Network Computers are right around the corner and
>>all will use Java. Some will run games and be WebTV like.
>
>And what is a "Network Computer"? Oracle supposedly has the term
>trademarked and all of *their* machines will probably use Java but
>various other X and dumb terminal makers are jumping on the "NC"
>bandwagon and don't use Java. What is your timeframe for this?
I am trying to find out as well. You can buy the NC today from IBM
but the software isn't ready. Oracle set a standard. We have a pilot scheduled
in three months.
Thomas Nagy
In <5hd74p$prk$1...@halcyon.com>, t...@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) writes:
>Arun Gupta <gu...@tlctest.mt.att.com.> wrote:
>>>(Also, any Microsoft extensions to Java in J++ are a superset
>>>of what is available on other platforms, so you can still do your 100% pure
>>>Java development with Microsoft's development system).
>>
>>And what mechanism is provided in the development system to avoid using
>>Microsoft extensions to Java ?
>
>Only type things that you find in your Sun Java manuals. If you can't
>figure that out, you should be programming in BASIC, not Java.
>
Does MS ship their Java stuff with Sun manuals?
Also, there are many ways to encourage 'extensions'. Some 'extensions'
could be macro-like (wrapping) features which enables the programmer
to call an API instead of calling 2 or 3 with added logic. Tell me which
method you will use... The popularity of RAD tools is that it saves a lot
of thinking on the programmer's side making development faster. Once
they introduce these (initially innocent, real Java) macro-like features,
they can continue to add more, except those will not be 100% Java, but
propriatory extensions. Is it a too far-fetched idea?
Thomas Nagy
Anthony D. Tribelli
Chris Trimble (tri...@walrus.com) wrote:
: Adam Haun wrote:
: > The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being
: > uninformed and prejudiced...
:
: I hope you meant at _most_ 20-25...
Perhaps the average person playing a game is 20-25 and the average player
who actually purchased the game is 30-35. So developers may only actually
care about the later. Just idle speculation. ;-)
Anthony D. Tribelli
cro...@kuentos.guam.net wrote:
: >: Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
: >: Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
: >: performance.
:
: Anyone who says this has not really seen a Mac game.
:
: >The problem is not the Mac, it is the developer. Too many do a crappy
: >port. When a port is done correctly I've measured similar performance
: >between a P5-90 and a PPC601-66.
:
: If the games on the PC are done properly, they are on DOS. They get
: their speed from accessing hardware directly, which you can't do on
: Win95 or MacOS ...
You are misinformed, it's a question of well written versus poorly
written again. Some Win95 programs just use DirectX to initialization the
system as they desire and then go direct to hardware for I/O.
: ... PowerPCs also outperform Pentiums on both integer and floating point.
It is a bit foolish to start quoting CPU data sheets. The clock cycles
listed are best case. To say there are many other variables would be an
understatement. For example my Pentium-166 enjoys a 66 MHz bus while my
PowerPC 604e-180 suffers from a 40 MHz bus.
Anthony D. Tribelli
Organization: Netcom On-Line Services
Distribution: world
Michael Hermann (her...@vogelweide.fmi.uni-passau.de) wrote:
: Actually I do have a 486DX2-66 with 20MB RAM and it works nicely (I still
: will upgrade soon..).
As an aside, be careful with 486's with more than 16M. Some motherboards
don't properly implement DMA and caching about 16M and these systems get
slower when upgrade from 16M to something larger.
Jack Miller
> I'm totally in John's camp on Rhapsody. Mac hardware is *cool*, but we
> won't make another game for MacOS. It goes beyond the OS & development
> tools.
>
> This Christmas, retailers refused to stock new Mac product. Several
> publishers went ape-shit and went to Apple to get something done. I
> haven't heard of any progress yet. That meant that Mac Abuse was not
> sold in stores, even though it got a good reception from players.
> Pissed me off somethin' fierce.
I can see why you'd be pissed, but I know LOTS of Mac gamers and I don't
know ANY who purchase their software in retail outlets. We all buy from
mail order houses like Cyberian Outpost, MacWarehouse, MacConnection,
MacMall, or MacZone. Abuse was sold by every company I buy from, and I
bought it. I played it, enjoyed it, and just finished it a couple of weeks
ago. I was looking forward to Golgotha (especially since recent posts
claimed a MacOS version is under consideration, despite your above
comment), and I'd urge you to reconsider.
Want to see how many Mac gamers are interested in Golgotha? Try creating
an email address to collect feedback on the subject, post it in
comp.sys.mac.games.* and cc: Mike Dixon of the Mac Gamer's Ledge
<mud...@eastnet.educ.ecu.edu> and Inside Mac Games magazine
<ne...@imgmagazine.com>, and ask who's interested, and whether they care if
it's only available from mail order houses. You may find out that a Mac
version would be very profitable.
Cheers,
xxx halloween jack xxx
Brian Wheeler
In article <ra4038-ya02408000...@newsgate.sps.mot.com>,
ra4038@NOSPAM@email.sps.mot.com (Scott Ashcraft) writes:
>In article <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net
>(Adam Haun) wrote:
>| >"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
>| >enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
>|
>| OS/2 is in the extreme minority. How many games are for OS/2? What
>| would the performance be like?
>
>Extreme minority? I would hazard a guess that OS/2 installations outnumber
>Linux by a wide margin.
I disagree. Linux is growing quite rapidly world-wide. OS/2 has
thousands of embedded installations, but then, that's not a gaming market...
"Hey cool, this ATM has a copy of doom on it!"
--
Brian Wheeler
bdwh...@indiana.edu
flm...@ibm.net
In <5hd74p$prk$1...@halcyon.com>, t...@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) writes:
>Arun Gupta <gu...@tlctest.mt.att.com.> wrote:
>>>(Also, any Microsoft extensions to Java in J++ are a superset
>>>of what is available on other platforms, so you can still do your 100% pure
>>>Java development with Microsoft's development system).
>>
>>And what mechanism is provided in the development system to avoid using
>>Microsoft extensions to Java ?
>
>Only type things that you find in your Sun Java manuals. If you can't
>figure that out, you should be programming in BASIC, not Java.
>
100% pure. From a management and testing perspective, this would be better
than using a tool with enticing features that may creep into the applet.
flm...@ibm.net
In <5hbs7u$q...@r02n01.cac.psu.edu>, er...@pobox.com (Eric Bennett) writes:
>In article <33395D49...@math.unc.edu>
>Tetsuji Ueda <ue...@math.unc.edu> writes:
>
>> > You need to check out the Corel Office For Java product or the
>> > is displacing its Office code with Java code even as we speak.
>>
>> back to check it out. They practically rewrote the whole damn ui
>> classes. And running it with Sun's VM sucks up mongo memory. And it's
>> slow. And it's nowhere near being as full-featured as Corel Office in
>> native code. So where's the advantage? Why would Microsoft port to
>> Java? So they can sell Unix versions?
>
>slow and now they're borrowing ideas from elsewhere.
>
>Eric Bennett ( er...@pobox.com ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )
>
>Microsoft: for those of you who don't want to go anywhere today.
The operating system's support for Java has a lot to do with speed.
The president of Corel, Mike Cowpland, states "In testing our new
Corel Office for Java under IBM's new OS/2 Warp environment, we
noticed a definite performance increase... This platform is indeed one
of the best operating system solutions in which to run Corel Office For Java..."
http://www.eskimo.com/~mighetto/client.htm
Shimpei Yamashita
Eric Bennett <er...@pobox.com> writes:
>
>In article <5hd74p$prk$1...@halcyon.com>
>t...@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) writes:
>
>> >Microsoft extensions to Java ?
>>
>> Only type things that you find in your Sun Java manuals. If you can't
>> figure that out, you should be programming in BASIC, not Java.
>
>extensions as well as a compiler flag you could set to tell it whether
>or not to enforce rigid ISO standards or to allow the platform-specific
>enhancements...
Less obscurely, many C compilers allow you to disable/enable features in
addition to the standard ANSI C. gcc on Unix, for example, falls back into
strict ANSI C with the -ansi option.
--
Shimpei Yamashita <http://socrates.caltech.edu/%7Eshimpei/>
Bill Cochran
Jack Miller wrote:
> =
> I can see why you'd be pissed, but I know LOTS of Mac gamers and I don'=
t
> know ANY who purchase their software in retail outlets. We all buy fro=
m
> mail order houses like Cyberian Outpost, MacWarehouse, MacConnection,
> MacMall, or MacZone. Abuse was sold by every company I buy from, and I=
> bought it. I played it, enjoyed it, and just finished it a couple of w=
eeks
> ago. I was looking forward to Golgotha (especially since recent posts
> claimed a MacOS version is under consideration, despite your above
> comment), and I'd urge you to reconsider.
I agree with Jack here........In all my years of using a Mac, I have
never bought a piece of software from a local retail outlet. =
ATTENTION Crack dot com: Why don't you do as Blizzard and start making
a hybrid disc? Stores will not be able to refuse dos/Windows versions,
too. The old saying goes, "where there's a will there's a
way"........seems to me that the will isn't there.
-- =
Mr. Bill
OHHH NOOOO...! (:-o)
No man is ever so empty as when he is full of himself...........
ATTENTION!! To reply to me via email, please remove =
the =93*=94 in the header line. This =93*=94 was placed there to =
deter autoremailers from sending unwanted junkmail.
Adam Haun
On 27 Mar 1997 16:23:37 GMT, pcg...@ibm.net wrote:
>In <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net (Adam Haun) writes:
>|On 25 Mar 1997 15:03:49 GMT, pcg...@ibm.net wrote:
>|
>||In <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes:
>|||Here is an excerpt of John Carmack's .PLAN on his thoughts about operating
>|||systems. Carmack, of ID software, is one of the industry's brightest
>|||minds, and is realtively detached about his OS choices -- he's not a
>|||religious zealot. So it's interesting to see what he thinks about the
>|||various operating systems moving forward.
>||
>||Judging from the comments below, it is easy to see how one makes lots
>||of money programming games for teenage boys: think like a teenager.
>|
>|The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being uninformed and
>|prejudiced...
>
>Apparently you are too young to think like an adult; but, no longer
>a teenager either. How sad for you. 30-35 year olds who still exhibit
>many of the attributes of teen age boys are not uncommon, now are they?
>Sports Bars. Computers as video game stations. BMW's with automatic
>transmissions. You get the picture.
Once again: I am not making this up. This is the result of several
independent surveys.
Note that I am referring to *COMPUTER GAMES*, not *VIDEO GAMES*. The
average console system player is a young teenage boy. Maybe you just
never played a computer game that wasn't a Doom clone, and that is
skewing your opinion a bit?
>||"Win32 rules the world" ??
>|
>|From a marketing standpoint, yes.
>
>Well, take your MBA outside to play with it, OK? I'm sure there must be
>marketing ng's somewhere out there on Usenet; but, I didn't notice any
>in this posting's header...
Pardon me. I meant that Win32 is now in the majority of systems,
therefore one should make more money programming for it.
>||"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
>||enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
>|
>|OS/2 is in the extreme minority. How many games are for OS/2? What
>|would the performance be like?
>
>OS/2 outnumbers NT by something in the area of 5-10x. OS/2 clients
>outnumber NT clients by more like 20x. There are numerous games for
>OS/2, however, they do not tend to be in the max testosterone category;
>so, you probably wouldn't know they even exist. As for performance,
>OS/2 excels are providing robust multi-tasking & multi-threading - it
>does not require a system setting to favor the focus app extrodinarily
>to provide that performance as does NT.
Listen, if you want to start a thread, let's do it without all the
insults, ok? You are very seriously mistaken about computer games
today, which is not a surprise since you have apparently never played
one except Doom or Quake. I am aware that OS/2 is a very good system,
but it can run DOS games too. So you get more people in, hence more
money.
>||"MacOS
>||From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
>||and it doesn't matter all that much."
>|
>|Damn right. Mac is almost dead anyway. If you have seen a game on a
>|Mac you know why they won't do it. Too much time for too little
>|performance.
>
>Oh Gee, game performance is the only measure you have for the foremost
>graphics arts environment? Grow up. The same goes for Mr Carmack.
>Of course, at least he's _making_ money from his insight's into the
>teenage psyche (as exhibited by teen agers of all ages <G>).
You've never seen a Mac game have you. Released a year after the PC
version comes out, and looks worse and runs slower too. Doesn't sound
like "the foremost graphics environment" to me. A brand new $2000 mac
couldn't beat my old $1000 PC running Dark Forces, though it had twice
the RAM.
>||There's lots more in there; but, unless you ascribe to the Cult of
>||Personality, there's not much meat. Just one more entrapeneur saying:
>||"Show me the money!" Yawn
>|
>|What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
>|gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>
>Try Linux for real efficiency. DOS acheives it's performance by simply
>stepping out of the way. A good programmer can acheive miracles in
>DOS, a poor one can create The Monster Who Devoured Cleveland in record
>time.
But you didn't mention Linux above, did you?
Adam Haun
On 26 Mar 1997 23:58:59 -0800, t...@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) wrote:
>> What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
>> gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>>
>
>Win 95, OS/2, and NT *do* *not* suck performance like a vacuum.
>E.g., doing "timerefresh" from the start in Quake with my default setup
>on my P133 with Diamond Stealth 64 Video, using the drivers that come with
>the OS, if any, I got these numbers for two timerefreshes back to back:
>
> DOS: 23.71 fps, 23.79 fps (Quake.exe 1.07)
> W95: 22.95 fps, 23.06 fps (Quake.exe 1.07)
> OS/2: 22.32 fps, 23.33 fps (Quake.exe 1.07)
> NT: 22.57 ftp, 22.72 fps (WinQuake .992)
>
>(I don't happen to have Linux Quake, which is why I didn't include it.
>I didn't use WinQuake on Windows 95 because it didn't have the video mode
>I wanted).
>
>Yes, DOS is fastest, but not be enough to be worth rebooting for, or even
>noticable except by benchmarking. Carmack is not giving up significant
>performance by dropping DOS, so the only question for Carmack is whether or
>not the sales to people who have DOS only is worth the development and support
>time.
>
>--Tim Smith
Win NT required what, 38 megs of RAM? You must have a whole lot of RAM
to be able to run quake in that. Windoze games may not be much slower,
but they sure require plenty to get there(which OS will run quake in 8
megs of ram?).
William Tanksley
Adam Haun <ka...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>The end user is who really matters though, right?
Of course. And the end user wants games now, not in the sweet
bye-and-bye. I'm disappointed that there will be no more DOS games from
them as well, but oh well! OTOH, masybe he'd be willing to reconsider
now that Mesa GL is available under DOS.
>>>I think he made the case for a good API which is not exclusive to DOS.
>>>In fact the guy hates DirectX and likes OpenGL.
>Too bad it doesn't quite work all the way yet. In the GLQuake docs it
>says that you can expect severely low FPS unless you have a very
>expensive GL compatible video card.
You utterly misunderstood. GLQuake needs a fast 3D accelerator, and
since it uses OpenGL that accelerator must be supported. Mesa supports
the 3Dfx.
It's GLQuake that uses all the fancy features, not OpenGL.
also, OpenGL supports a LOT of features that are not supported at all in
Direct3D; it's quite likely that GLQuake wouldn't be anywhere as
detailed.
>Really? Ever heard of VBE 1.2 and 2.0? I wouldn't call 640x480x256,
>800x600x256, and 1024x768x256 bad(and 1280x1024, etc.). Plus more with
>VBE 2.0. I *think* that more colors are supported, but due to
>performance issues they haven't been widely done except on 3d
>accelerated games.
Yeah, but they're not always implemented in a usable way, and even then
they're often slow (due to emulations).
>That's why you run UNIVBE. Which is included with the game.
I like S3VBE. It's free.
-Billy
Aristophanes
In article <333BED...@usit.net>, Bill Cochran <b*coc...@usit.net> wrote:
> Jack Miller wrote:
> >
> > I can see why you'd be pissed, but I know LOTS of Mac gamers and I don't
> > know ANY who purchase their software in retail outlets. We all buy from
> > mail order houses like Cyberian Outpost, MacWarehouse, MacConnection,
> > MacMall, or MacZone. Abuse was sold by every company I buy from, and I
> > ago. I was looking forward to Golgotha (especially since recent posts
> > claimed a MacOS version is under consideration, despite your above
> > comment), and I'd urge you to reconsider.
>
> I agree with Jack here........In all my years of using a Mac, I have
> never bought a piece of software from a local retail outlet.
That may be you, but not the vast majority of consumer buyers who have Macs and want Mac-only products. Mail order accounts for perhaps no more than 25% of all Mac software sales, and has, in fact, declined a few percentage points over the last six months.
There's an aritificial distinction between "Mac users" and "Windows users". There really isn't one. For every coder, for Apple even, EVERYONE is or has the potential to be a Mac user and buy MacOS compatible products. Nothing hurts the Mac market more than this artificial "you're either in our camp or theirs" marketing focus of the Mac community. It turns
off us retailers.
Many retailers avoided Mac products because shelf and floors space is very valuable and the MacOS market share limits the space we can afford to give MacOS products. Boost the market share and this problem will evaporate. We cannot reserve X amount of shelf space for a products which 92% of our customers don't want. That's the fact. Perhaps hybrid products
is the way to go.
Steven C. Den Beste
flm...@ibm.net wrote:
>
> In <5h6i3r$s...@r02n01.cac.psu.edu>, er...@pobox.com (Eric Bennett) writes:
> >In article <01bc3867$743a5c60$ea7b8dcc@diablo>
> >Well, it's hard to disagree with him from a developer's viewpoint.
> >Especially a *game* developer's viewpoint. Lack of PM is no fun for a
> >developer. And as a games developer, I doubt he cares very much for
> >the good Apple technologies like OT, ColorSync, and QuickDraw GX.
>
> Sure its easy to disagree, even for a game developer. It isn't just OS/2 vs Windows,
> its Java vs Windows. The news that Win97 won't be ready until 1998 will give
> developers some time to investigate Java. Its is a write once run anywhere
> concept that from a business perspective is persuasive. After the developer
> has selected Java, all platforms are the target platform and the generally
> accepted principle of developing on the target platform to cut down on testing
> lab time no longer applies. Developers are then free to choose the best platform
> for Java development. NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't
Please note that Microsoft isn't the only vendor of Java development
tools which run under the WIN32 environment.
Steven C. Den Beste
Scott Ashcraft wrote:
>
> In article <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net
> (Adam Haun) wrote:
>
> |
> | The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being uninformed and
> | prejudiced...
>
>
> |
> |
> | From a marketing standpoint, yes.
>
That may be true in total, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if
among gamers Win 95 was now a majority. Win 3.1 was always a really
shitty gaming platform.
> | What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
> | gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>
> I agree fully. Besides, with one DOS version, you cover Win95, Win3.1 and OS/2.
The reason is expense and difficulty at development time. If you develop
for Win 95, you don't have to worry about drivers.
DOS really doesn't help a developer at all; the services it provides are
minimal. WIN32 is a vastly richer foundation on which to build.
uci.edu
In <5hhmh9$rli$1...@thefuture.qualcomm.com>, "Steven C. Den Beste" <"sdenbest@NOSPAM"@qualcomm.com> writes:
>> It isn't just OS/2 vs Windows,
>> its Java vs Windows. The news that Win97 won't be ready until 1998 will give
>> developers some time to investigate Java. Its is a write once run anywhere
>> concept that from a business perspective is persuasive. After the developer
>> has selected Java, all platforms are the target platform and the generally
>> accepted principle of developing on the target platform to cut down on testing
>> lab time no longer applies. Developers are then free to choose the best platform
>> for Java development. NT and Win95 are not best because Microsoft doesn't
>> support 100% pure Java. This makes OS/2 or others better choices.
>
>Please note that Microsoft isn't the only vendor of Java development
>tools which run under the WIN32 environment.
I think Developers are interested in java because of the promise of write once,
and run anywhere. So long as Microsoft (and other vendors making Java
development tools for Windows) doesn't support 100% pure java, there
is no point in developing Java apps for Microsoft platforms. The developer
might as well take advantage of the knowledge and existing code that uses
the native API. Assuming, of course, that Microsoft isn't able to make its Java
extensions the standard. In any case, a fragmented Java standard does no good.
Arun Gupta
>
>I think Developers are interested in java because of the promise
>of write once, and run anywhere. So long as Microsoft (and other
>vendors making Java development tools for Windows) doesn't support
>100% pure java, there is no point in developing Java apps for Microsoft
>platforms. The developer might as well take advantage of the knowledge
>and existing code that uses the native API. Assuming, of course,
>that Microsoft isn't able to make its Java extensions the standard.
>In any case, a fragmented Java standard does no good.
There are two solutions to the "write once, and run anywhere" problem.
One is a universally applicable Java standard. We are frighteningly close
to the second solution, which is Windows everywhere***. Guess which solution
Microsoft wants ?
As you note, a fragmented Java standard does not good for the first
solution. That in itself should have sufficient explanatory power
as to current events in the industry.
-arun gupta
:-)
***Footnote : OK, OK, it won't necessarily run, but it won't do worse
than other Windows applications.
Joe Anstett
pcg...@ibm.net wrote in article <5h8pgl$3kq$2...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>...
> Judging from the comments below, it is easy to see how one makes lots
> of money programming games for teenage boys: think like a teenager.
>
> "Win32 rules the world" ??
>
> "A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't
care
> enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
>
> "MacOS
> From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that
matters,
> and it doesn't matter all that much."
>
> There's lots more in there; but, unless you ascribe to the Cult of
> Personality, there's not much meat. Just one more entrapeneur saying:
> "Show me the money!" Yawn
Yeah, boring childish games. IBM and OS/2 would never take a ***DIVE***
and stoop to such a level, would they?
Your comments are yet another example of IBM not understanding what people
do with computers.
Joe (Former OS/2 user, and former IBM Boca Raton employee)
Joe Anstett
Brian Wheeler <bdwh...@indiana.edu> wrote in article
<5hgo5g$n...@dismay.ucs.indiana.edu>...
> In article <ra4038-ya02408000...@newsgate.sps.mot.com>,
> ra4038@NOSPAM@email.sps.mot.com (Scott Ashcraft) writes:
> >In article <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net
> >(Adam Haun) wrote:
>
> >| >"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't
care
> >| >enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
> >|
> >| OS/2 is in the extreme minority. How many games are for OS/2? What
> >| would the performance be like?
> >
> >Extreme minority? I would hazard a guess that OS/2 installations
outnumber
> >Linux by a wide margin.
The big difference being that, even if Linux is outnumbered by OS/2, Linux
already has a port of Quake <g>.
Joe
Joe Anstett
pcg...@ibm.net wrote in article <5he6u9$2hi6$2...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>...
> Apparently you are too young to think like an adult; but, no longer
> a teenager either. How sad for you. 30-35 year olds who still exhibit
> many of the attributes of teen age boys are not uncommon, now are they?
> Sports Bars. Computers as video game stations. BMW's with automatic
> transmissions. You get the picture.
Once again an IBM enthusiast proves he doesn't understand how people use
PCs. Computers aren't meant for fun, damn it. (Why did IBM put multimedia
into OS/2?)
If you don't want their business, good for you. If you want to pretend
they don't exist, you're a fool.
> ||"Win32 rules the world" ??
> |
> |From a marketing standpoint, yes.
>
> Well, take your MBA outside to play with it, OK? I'm sure there must be
> marketing ng's somewhere out there on Usenet; but, I didn't notice any
> in this posting's header...
The market bears him out. You know, the desktop market IBM tried vainly to
compete for a few years ago, the one that it failed miserably in?
> OS/2 outnumbers NT by something in the area of 5-10x. OS/2 clients
> outnumber NT clients by more like 20x.
What are you smoking? NT's market share has surpassed that of OS/2. I
guess IBM is counting every copy of OS/2 ever sold in aggregate, including
the 10 or 15 that I'm responsible for. And maybe including the
thousands/millions of copies going unused in corporations all over the
world as they move to other operating systems.
> There are numerous games for
> OS/2, however, they do not tend to be in the max testosterone category;
> so, you probably wouldn't know they even exist.
Yeah, I was overwhelmed by Sim City for OS/2. I could dig out my Indelible
Blue catalog and name the forgettable OS/2 games I wasted my money on, but
I'm too lazy to go find it.
> As for performance,
> OS/2 excels are providing robust multi-tasking & multi-threading
when it's not crashing, that is.
> - it
> does not require a system setting to favor the focus app extrodinarily
> to provide that performance as does NT.
No, just have to tweak your CONFIG.SYS and 3,000 VDM settings.
> Oh Gee, game performance is the only measure you have for the foremost
> graphics arts environment? Grow up. The same goes for Mr Carmack.
> Of course, at least he's _making_ money from his insight's into the
> teenage psyche (as exhibited by teen agers of all ages <G>).
How dare you show discontent for what people do with their computers?
Again, you don't understand the market, explaining your choice of OS/2 <g>.
Joe (former OS/2 user and former IBM Boca Raton employee)
Adam Haun
On 28 Mar 1997 09:20:29 -0800, wtan...@owl.csusm.edu (William
Tanksley) wrote:
>Adam Haun <ka...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>The end user is who really matters though, right?
>
>Of course. And the end user wants games now, not in the sweet
>bye-and-bye. I'm disappointed that there will be no more DOS games from
>them as well, but oh well! OTOH, masybe he'd be willing to reconsider
>now that Mesa GL is available under DOS.
Mesa GL being OpenGL for DOS?
>>>>I think he made the case for a good API which is not exclusive to DOS.
>>>>In fact the guy hates DirectX and likes OpenGL.
>
>>Too bad it doesn't quite work all the way yet. In the GLQuake docs it
>>says that you can expect severely low FPS unless you have a very
>>expensive GL compatible video card.
>
>You utterly misunderstood. GLQuake needs a fast 3D accelerator, and
>since it uses OpenGL that accelerator must be supported. Mesa supports
>the 3Dfx.
The words in the docs were:
Unless you have a very good card(they recommend Intergraph
Realizm) you will receive very slow frame rates. Now if I want to use
all these features I should not need a thousand dollar video card to
do it. Unless it was just a bad OpenGL implementation.
>It's GLQuake that uses all the fancy features, not OpenGL.
Fancy features which 3d accelerators are supposed to allow games to
do.
>also, OpenGL supports a LOT of features that are not supported at all in
>Direct3D; it's quite likely that GLQuake wouldn't be anywhere as
>detailed.
I've seen the stuff comparing OpenGL to Direct3d. Now if only OpenGL
supported more 3d accelerators.
>>Really? Ever heard of VBE 1.2 and 2.0? I wouldn't call 640x480x256,
>>800x600x256, and 1024x768x256 bad(and 1280x1024, etc.). Plus more with
>>VBE 2.0. I *think* that more colors are supported, but due to
>>performance issues they haven't been widely done except on 3d
>>accelerated games.
>
>Yeah, but they're not always implemented in a usable way, and even then
>they're often slow (due to emulations).
Name a game from the last 3 years that hasn't implemented them
properly. I have yet to see one.
Adam Haun
On Fri, 28 Mar 1997 02:38:58 GMT, a...@netcom.com (Anthony D. Tribelli)
wrote:
>Chris Trimble (tri...@walrus.com) wrote:
>: Adam Haun wrote:
>
>: > The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being
>: > uninformed and prejudiced...
>:
>: I hope you meant at _most_ 20-25...
>
>Perhaps the average person playing a game is 20-25 and the average player
>who actually purchased the game is 30-35. So developers may only actually
>care about the later. Just idle speculation. ;-)
No, actually the age of the average gamer IS 30-35. Why does no one
believe this?
Adam Haun
On 29 Mar 1997 16:06:57 GMT, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com>
wrote:
>
>
>pcg...@ibm.net wrote in article <5he6u9$2hi6$2...@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net>...
>> Apparently you are too young to think like an adult; but, no longer
>> a teenager either. How sad for you. 30-35 year olds who still exhibit
>> many of the attributes of teen age boys are not uncommon, now are they?
>> Sports Bars. Computers as video game stations. BMW's with automatic
>> transmissions. You get the picture.
>
>Once again an IBM enthusiast proves he doesn't understand how people use
>PCs. Computers aren't meant for fun, damn it. (Why did IBM put multimedia
>into OS/2?)
Computers can be used for multiple purposes. Games spur technological
development, as well as providing entertainment. What's wrong with
that?
>If you don't want their business, good for you. If you want to pretend
>they don't exist, you're a fool.
>
>> ||"Win32 rules the world" ??
>> |
>> |From a marketing standpoint, yes.
>>
>> Well, take your MBA outside to play with it, OK? I'm sure there must be
>> marketing ng's somewhere out there on Usenet; but, I didn't notice any
>> in this posting's header...
>
>The market bears him out. You know, the desktop market IBM tried vainly to
>compete for a few years ago, the one that it failed miserably in?
>> OS/2 outnumbers NT by something in the area of 5-10x. OS/2 clients
>> outnumber NT clients by more like 20x.
>
>What are you smoking? NT's market share has surpassed that of OS/2. I
>guess IBM is counting every copy of OS/2 ever sold in aggregate, including
>the 10 or 15 that I'm responsible for. And maybe including the
>thousands/millions of copies going unused in corporations all over the
>world as they move to other operating systems.
>
>> There are numerous games for
>> OS/2, however, they do not tend to be in the max testosterone category;
>> so, you probably wouldn't know they even exist.
I am sick and tired of people thinking PC games are all Doom and
Duke3d. The current most popular games are Daggerfall(an RPG) and
Civilization II(even you Mac and OS/2 users must have heard of that!).
>Yeah, I was overwhelmed by Sim City for OS/2. I could dig out my Indelible
>Blue catalog and name the forgettable OS/2 games I wasted my money on, but
>I'm too lazy to go find it.
>
>> As for performance,
>> OS/2 excels are providing robust multi-tasking & multi-threading
>
>when it's not crashing, that is.
>
>> - it
>> does not require a system setting to favor the focus app extrodinarily
>> to provide that performance as does NT.
>
>No, just have to tweak your CONFIG.SYS and 3,000 VDM settings.
No, no, no. You have it all wrong. You are assuming that DOS is
extremely difficult to use and set up. You are wrong. I never have to
"Tweak my config.sys" to do anything. Config.sys just loads necessary
drivers(which are installed automatically by the setup program that
comes with the hardware). It has almost nothing to do with games these
days.
joseph
Steven C. Den Beste wrote:
> >
> > |
> > | The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being uninformed and
> > | prejudiced...
> >
Indeed the fact is not accurate. The mean age is less -- in their early
20's -- but the average gammer is more likely to have and or want a
32-bit game system, not a PC.
> > | >"Win32 rules the world" ??
> > |
> > | From a marketing standpoint, yes.
> >
> > Actually, Win3.1 installations still outnumber Win95/NT installations.
>
> That may be true in total, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if
> among gamers Win 95 was now a majority. Win 3.1 was always a really
> shitty gaming platform.
Win95's resource needs wrt DOS make it pretty shitty too -- some RAM
resource requirements are nearly double.
Compared to a $159 Playstation Win95 is pure compost. The deep price
reductions in game software of the playstation make the market even more
desirable for users.
--
Joseph Coughlan
Replies are welcome at joseph_...@otter.montery.edu
William de Haan
In message <5h9lgl$dbk$2...@news-s01.ca.us.ibm.net>, on 25 Mar 1997 23:01:41 GMT,
kiy...@ibm.net wrote:
>Hey, I didn't see anything about OS/390! What about CMS? I was on CMS today for
>4 hours. You should see VM/CMS haul on a watercooled 6 engine ES9000.
In your living room, right?
>OS/390 doesn't matter? AIX doesn't matter. You can't make money with OS/400?
Look at the source, Cory. They're talking about the games market. You're
not going to make a fortune selling OS/400 video games at $50 a pop any
more than you're going to run the Pentagon's databases on Access for
Windows.
>This may be one of some industries brightest minds but it sure isn't the
>computer industry.
>Isn't he really playing in the Sony Playstation, Nintendo, Sega Saturn market?
No, the PC and Apple home computer market. This is from ID software, the guys
that made DOOM and etc.
________________________________________________________________________
William de Haan b...@deus.com 905-281-3523 Voice 905-281-3524 Fax
Deus Ex Machina Ltd., 3650 Kaneff Crescent, Mississauga, Ontario L5A 4A1
No hablo espanol. Non parlo Italiano. eG'K Hy's Klingon.
Steven C. Den Beste
Adam Haun wrote:
> Steven Den Beste wrote:
> >>> You're looking at it from the point of view of someone running the
> >>> program. He's looking at it from the point of view of someone *writing*
> >>> the program and *supporting* the program.
>
> The end user is who really matters though, right?
What most end users want is games *soon* and *cheap* and *reliable*.
It is not always the case that a product with a wider potential audience
will necessarily be more profitable to the developer. If increasing the
audience by, say, 15% doubles the development cost, then the developer
actually loses.
The developer may decide that it is better to accept a somewhat smaller
potential audience for the benefit of significantly decreased
development time and resources. For one thing, that means that they may
be able to apply some of those resources to another product.
Speaking as an end user, I'd rather have two WIN32 games than one DOS
game. I'd rather have a WIN32 game which installed easily and worked
first time than a DOS game which required me to yet again muck around
with drivers and memory availability. I'd rather have a WIN32 game which
worked on any hardware supported by Win 95 than a DOS game which only
supported a subset of that hardware.
And apparently so would John Carmack.
Adam Haun
On Sat, 29 Mar 1997 12:37:41 -0800, joseph <jo...@ibm.net> wrote:
>Steven C. Den Beste wrote:
>>
>> Scott Ashcraft wrote:
>> >
>> > In article <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net
>> > (Adam Haun) wrote:
>> >
>> > |
>> > | The average age of gamers is 30-35. Talk about being uninformed and
>> > | prejudiced...
>> >
>> > Really? Where do you get your information?
>
>Indeed the fact is not accurate. The mean age is less -- in their early
>20's -- but the average gammer is more likely to have and or want a
>32-bit game system, not a PC.
Ah, now I see the misunderstanding. I menat the average age of
COMPUTER gamers, not console gamers.
Nathan Hughes
Adam Haun <ka...@earthlink.net> wrote in article
<333c014e...@news.earthlink.net>...
Quake will run fairly well under 95 with 16 meg, and it will run in 8. 16
meg = $80. Get with the program, modern computers ship with at least 16
meg and many come with 32. Who cares about anything with only 8?
Nate
Chris Johnson
On Fri, Mar 28, 1997 5:45 PM, Adam Haun <mailto:ka...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>Pardon me. I meant that Win32 is now in the majority of systems,
>therefore one should make more money programming for it.
Hah! Maybe for games. Just don't waste your time trying to program
anything else- you (yes you!) could experience the joy of trying to compete
against a company hundreds of times larger than you, who owns the OS and
can _make_ _your_ _program_ _break_. On purpose, just to put you out of
business. And nobody is going to do anything about it- and well over half
your customers will simply curse you and buy the MS version of what you
tried to offer them, and will badmouth you forevermore if you take MS to
court.
So stick to games... but not games about Monster Trucks... ;)
Jinx_tigr
(aka Chris Johnson)
robert denton
::If you have any published results (even on the web), I'd appreciate seeing
::them. I'm keeping track of performance comparisons on my web site.
::
::Your performance is pretty typical. A 66 MHz 601 in general does match a
::P5-90 on most commercial apps.
::
::--
::Regards,
::
::Joe Ragosta
::joe.r...@dol.net
::See the Complete Macintosh Advocacy Site
::http://www.dol.net/~Ragosta/complmac.htm
My recent tests between my Pent200/WinNT4.0/128ram/Photoshop4.0 vs. my
PPC604-150/MacOS7.6/80ram(50 to photoshop)/Photoshop4:
I did a simple, quick test... New 640x480 rgb image, simple gradient, add
noise, do radial blur (the real test):
Pent200--16.4 seconds
PPC150--9.1 seconds
Plus this NT system crashes just as often as the Mac(crashing less with
7.6) and has had numerous setup downtime--it just isn't as productive and
the NT OS costs about 100bucks more!
-r
Dean Dancey
Yup, make ALL the programs run ONLY under WIN95. Save time, money,
and just think, when Billy Boy decides that you have a good product, you
won't even have to worry about profits. Cuz you gave the right to
package your software with his. And, in two years, when he makes the
NEW version, you get to write the program again, because nothing will be
backwards compatible. So Billy just rakes in the cash from all these
suckers.-Dean Dancey
Darwin Ouyang
In article <333d7090...@news.earthlink.net>,
Adam Haun <ka...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>The words in the docs were:
> Unless you have a very good card(they recommend Intergraph
>Realizm) you will receive very slow frame rates. Now if I want to use
>all these features I should not need a thousand dollar video card to
>do it. Unless it was just a bad OpenGL implementation.
Nah. Get yourself a 3DFX Voodoo based card. (The new Flash3D retails for
~$150 US.) On a P200 you'll easily see 45-55 fps in GLQuake under Win'95.
Darwin Ouyang
Adam Haun
But why should I be forced to upgrade to play the same game with worse
performace? My POINT here(which you seem to have missed) was that
Win95/NT's performance is an impediment to games.
Like a tea tray in the sky...
In article <01bc3c58$9511eda0$9c7b8dcc@diablo>, "Joe Anstett" <jans...@world2u.com> writes...
>> "A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't
>care
>> enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
>>
>> From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that
>matters,
>> and it doesn't matter all that much."
>>
>> There's lots more in there; but, unless you ascribe to the Cult of
>> Personality, there's not much meat. Just one more entrapeneur saying:
>> "Show me the money!" Yawn
>
>Yeah, boring childish games. IBM and OS/2 would never take a ***DIVE***
>and stoop to such a level, would they?
He's dead on right about the "show me the money" part. App developers write
for the market leader platform, it's the law of increasing returns (read
the Time "Master of the Universe" article for more on that).
>Your comments are yet another example of IBM not understanding what people
>do with computers.
Because he posts from ibm.net you assume he represents IBM?
Tom O'Toole - ecf_...@jhuvms.hcf.jhu.edu - tom.o...@jhu.edu
JHUVMS system programmer - http://jhuvms.hcf.jhu.edu/~ecf_stbo/
This message has been brought to you by bill gates, inventor of the internet
'The Internet'... is not a valid Win32 application, bill. Boycott bg shoveware!
nate
On Mon, 31 Mar 1997 19:44:35 -0800, Dean Dancey <dt...@sympatico.ca>
wrote:
Name one time when MS has upgraded their consumer os and broke
backward compatibility. I have yet to find a dos app that wont run
under 3.1 or 95 nor a 3.1 app that wont run under 95. MS is like
apple, if they introduce a new os that wont run older apps nobodys
gonna buy it. It seems to me that since Bill Gates is in this to make
money, and selling OS's is his way of doing it, he would do very
little to dissuade anyone from buying the on he offers. You need to
think a little before you post such nonsense. As far as the new QUAKE
being win95 only, did it ever occur to you that Win95 has been
optimized to run games very well?
When the next version of windows arrives, if it offers developers like
John Carmack new tools for developing a new and better version of
their game or app, I bet they will jump at it. Look at Adobe, Intel
has sold what, 2 or 3 MMx processors and Photoshop is already tuned
ffor it.
Nate
>
>
Steven C. Den Beste
The answer is that you are not upgrading to play the *same* game; you're
upgrading to play *new* games. And depending on the game, performance
under Win 95 can actually be better than DOS, because disk operations
are faster and more efficient under Win 95.
--
Steven C. Den Beste (Gentleman, scholar)
sden...@san.rr.com
sden...@qualcomm.com
David Veal
In article <334022c6...@news.earthlink.net>,
Adam Haun <ka...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>On 30 Mar 1997 17:58:23 GMT, "Nathan Hughes" <nhu...@idir.net> wrote:
>>Quake will run fairly well under 95 with 16 meg, and it will run in 8. 16
>>meg = $80. Get with the program, modern computers ship with at least 16
>>meg and many come with 32. Who cares about anything with only 8?
>
>performace? My POINT here(which you seem to have missed) was that
>Win95/NT's performance is an impediment to games.
It's been my experience with Windows 95 that a native Win95 game
providing the same result as the DOS version requires four more megs of
RAM and a "step up" for the processor. (P133 vs. P90, etc). DOS games
running under Win95 require pretty much what they would have otherwise,
and occasionally give better performance.
However, raw performance isn't the only consideration. Which is why
developers are moving from DOS to Win95 (and getting NT largely as a
bonus). The customers they lose from requiring slightly more capable
machines for the same performance is more than counterbalanced by shorter,
easier development for video and sound and the customers they gain who can
make use of the software that use hardware that previously it wasn't worth
writing DOS support for.
Win95's performance in terms of speed is a minus for games. In terms
of driver support it's a big plus. In an time of powerful desktop
machines, the latter is winning out.
--
David Veal ve...@utkux.utk.edu http://www.ce.utk.edu/veal
"Any smoothly functioning technology will be
indistinguishable from a rigged demo." Isaac Asimov
Adam Haun
On 1 Apr 1997 16:22:45 GMT, ve...@utkux.utk.edu (David Veal) wrote:
>In article <334022c6...@news.earthlink.net>,
>Adam Haun <ka...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>On 30 Mar 1997 17:58:23 GMT, "Nathan Hughes" <nhu...@idir.net> wrote:
>>>Quake will run fairly well under 95 with 16 meg, and it will run in 8. 16
>>>meg = $80. Get with the program, modern computers ship with at least 16
>>>meg and many come with 32. Who cares about anything with only 8?
>>
>>But why should I be forced to upgrade to play the same game with worse
>>performace? My POINT here(which you seem to have missed) was that
>>Win95/NT's performance is an impediment to games.
>
> It's been my experience with Windows 95 that a native Win95 game
>providing the same result as the DOS version requires four more megs of
>RAM and a "step up" for the processor. (P133 vs. P90, etc). DOS games
>running under Win95 require pretty much what they would have otherwise,
>and occasionally give better performance.
>
> However, raw performance isn't the only consideration. Which is why
>developers are moving from DOS to Win95 (and getting NT largely as a
>bonus). The customers they lose from requiring slightly more capable
>machines for the same performance is more than counterbalanced by shorter,
>easier development for video and sound and the customers they gain who can
>make use of the software that use hardware that previously it wasn't worth
>writing DOS support for.
So it's now easier to make multimediocre games that will flood the
shelves and cause the good games to cost more due to lack of shelf
space. Easier development is a double edged sword!
Tim Smith
David Veal <ve...@utkux.utk.edu> wrote:
> However, raw performance isn't the only consideration. Which is why
>developers are moving from DOS to Win95 (and getting NT largely as a
>bonus). The customers they lose from requiring slightly more capable
I suspect that they don't just get NT as a bonus. Once you decide that
you are going to run on 95, it's not a big leap to notice that if you make
it run on NT, you can do most of your development there, rather than
under 95. NT is a heck of a lot nicer development environment than 95.
So my guess is that most new games that support NT (e.g., WinQuake) do
so because the developer actually did the work on NT, and only booted
95 when necessary.
--Tim Smith
Kay-Yut Chen
>I am sick and tired of people thinking PC games are all Doom and
>Duke3d. The current most popular games are Daggerfall(an RPG) and
>Civilization II(even you Mac and OS/2 users must have heard of that!).
>
Those games are popular like 6 months ago. Now they are:
Diablo, Magic the Gathering and Interstate 76. <g>
=====================================================================
| A Traveler between dimensions | |
+ ------------------------------+ |
| |
| In the Kingdom of Drakkar, I am known as <Narius the Mentalist> |
| To the denizens of Britainnia, my name is <Seldon the Avatar> |
| The Terran Confederation pilots call me <One the Cat Slayer> |
| |
| Seldon Dragon |
| #UDIC# |
| |
| <<Kay-Yut Chen>> |
| |
=====================================================================
Brian Kimball
nate wrote:
>
> On Mon, 31 Mar 1997 19:44:35 -0800, Dean Dancey <dt...@sympatico.ca>
> wrote:
>
> >Yup, make ALL the programs run ONLY under WIN95. Save time, money,
> >and just think, when Billy Boy decides that you have a good product, you
> >won't even have to worry about profits. Cuz you gave the right to
> >package your software with his. And, in two years, when he makes the
> >NEW version, you get to write the program again, because nothing will be
> >backwards compatible. So Billy just rakes in the cash from all these
> >suckers.-Dean Dancey
>
> Name one time when MS has upgraded their consumer os and broke
> backward compatibility. I have yet to find a dos app that wont run
> under 3.1 or 95 nor a 3.1 app that wont run under 95. MS is like
> apple, if they introduce a new os that wont run older apps nobodys
> gonna buy it. It seems to me that since Bill Gates is in this to make
> money, and selling OS's is his way of doing it, he would do very
> little to dissuade anyone from buying the on he offers.
Netscape broke, thanks to M$. According to your logic M$ would never do
this because Netscape is a widely used and popular program, but it did,
intentionally or unintentionally. Your argument only works with dos
apps, not with legacy Win apps. I've found that old win apps are
usually terribly buggy when combined with M$-95.
> You need to
> think a little before you post such nonsense.
Hehe. Funny to hear you say that. Dean posts a half-joke/half-truth,
obviously not meant to be taken literally, and you read it literally,
responding with exaggerations and a bad attitude.
> As far as the new QUAKE
> being win95 only, did it ever occur to you that Win95 has been
> optimized to run games very well?
I'm sorry, but please don't include 'optimize' and 'win95' in the same
sentence.
kimball
damn news server won't let me post when I quote more words than write
Thomas Nagy
In <334053bd...@nntp.idir.net>, nhu...@idir.net (nate) writes:
>On Mon, 31 Mar 1997 19:44:35 -0800, Dean Dancey <dt...@sympatico.ca>
>wrote:
>
>>Yup, make ALL the programs run ONLY under WIN95. Save time, money,
>>and just think, when Billy Boy decides that you have a good product, you
>>won't even have to worry about profits. Cuz you gave the right to
>>package your software with his. And, in two years, when he makes the
>>NEW version, you get to write the program again, because nothing will be
>>backwards compatible. So Billy just rakes in the cash from all these
>>suckers.-Dean Dancey
>
>Name one time when MS has upgraded their consumer os and broke
>backward compatibility. I have yet to find a dos app that wont run
>under 3.1 or 95 nor a 3.1 app that wont run under 95.
I have a LOT of DOS apps that will not run under Wind95, all those
that use the BIOS (printing and/or keyboard) services. They will not
only hang Wind95, but the underlying MS-DOS 7 as well, once you
quit the Wind95 shell ('plain' DOS). The "Hello World!" programs
do work, but they are not really essential to my business, so to speak :)
Yes, they work under OS/2 without a hitch...
>MS is like
>apple, if they introduce a new os that wont run older apps nobodys
>gonna buy it.
You got it all wrong...
This is part of the plan. Break all USEFUL programs (but make sure
"Hello, World!" works), so that the typical user (who in many cases
cannot even identify the Operating Environment (s)he uses!) will just
have to look for an alternative (which is conveniently available in
Winblows whatever flavor, usually made by MS).
>It seems to me that since Bill Gates is in this to make
>money, and selling OS's is his way of doing it, he would do very
>little to dissuade anyone from buying the on he offers. You need to
>think a little before you post such nonsense.
I have been suffering from MS's practices for about a decade now
and let me tell you that the post is not such a nonsense.
>As far as the new QUAKE
>being win95 only, did it ever occur to you that Win95 has been
>optimized to run games very well?
You mean the 'auto-quit-the-shell' feature?
>When the next version of windows arrives, if it offers developers like
>John Carmack new tools for developing a new and better version of
>their game or app, I bet they will jump at it. Look at Adobe, Intel
>has sold what, 2 or 3 MMx processors and Photoshop is already tuned
>ffor it.
>
>Nate
Nate, believe it or not, most people who buy a computer do not pay a
few thousand bucks just to get a game machine. There are other, much
cheaper alternatives. Having games will certainly add appeal to the
computer, but it is still just a secondary consideration.
Thomas Nagy
Keith E. Moore
On Thu, 27 Mar 1997 12:09:40 -0600, Scott Ashcraft <ra4038@NOSPAM@email.sps.mot.com> wrote:
>In article <3337f940...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net
>(Adam Haun) wrote:
>
>|
>|
>|
>| From a marketing standpoint, yes.
>
>Actually, Win3.1 installations still outnumber Win95/NT installations.
Until about mid-'96 Win3.11 _sales_ outnumbered '95 sales.
>
>|
>| >"A native OS/2 port of any of our products is unlikely. We just don't care
>| >enough, and we are unwilling to take time away from anything else."
>|
>| OS/2 is in the extreme minority. How many games are for OS/2? What
>| would the performance be like?
>
>Extreme minority? I would hazard a guess that OS/2 installations outnumber
>Linux by a wide margin. There aren't a lot of games for OS/2, mainly
>because DOS games seem to work fine.
I will agree that the DOS support under OS/2 is 100 times better than
NT's DOS support.
>
>Why would performance be any less than Win95 or NT?
>
>|
>| What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
>| gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
>
>I agree fully. Besides, with one DOS version, you cover Win95, Win3.1 and OS/2.
I agree, but the need to write custum drivers is huge. Microsoft knew
this, which is the reason for DirectX. Without it, DOS+3.11 would probably
still be outselling '95.
>
>
> scott ashcraft | email: ra4...@email.sps.mot.com
> software engineer | ph. : +1.512.933.3916
> motorola mos2 cim | team os/2 running wintel-free
> | my opinions are my own
>anti-spam enabled, remove @NOSPAM from my address when replying
--
-- Keith Moore
President
KMA Computer Solutions, Inc.
--
/*----C/C++--Java--VB--Pro*C--SQL--OCI--Java--Delphi--ODBC--COBOL-----*
* When the project must be saved at all costs: *
* KMA Computer Solutions, Inc. Project Troubleshooting/Recovery *
*---------Linux---AIX---HPUX---SYSV---Novell---NT---OS/2---'95-------*/
David Veal
In article <3341a03...@news.earthlink.net>,
"You must be at least this tall to program for this operating
system."
Hugh Whalen
In article <334116...@san.rr.com>, "Steven C. Den Beste"
<NOSPAM:sden...@san.rr.com> says...
> Adam Haun wrote:
> >
> > On 30 Mar 1997 17:58:23 GMT, "Nathan Hughes" <nhu...@idir.net> wrote:
> > >Quake will run fairly well under 95 with 16 meg, and it will run in 8. 16
> > >meg = $80. Get with the program, modern computers ship with at least 16
> > >meg and many come with 32. Who cares about anything with only 8?
> > >
> >
> > But why should I be forced to upgrade to play the same game with worse
> > performace? My POINT here(which you seem to have missed) was that
> > Win95/NT's performance is an impediment to games.
>
> upgrading to play *new* games. And depending on the game, performance
> under Win 95 can actually be better than DOS, because disk operations
> are faster and more efficient under Win 95.
>
While Win95/NT's performance may be an impediment to games it does not
appear to be an impediment to game sales.
If you look at the Software Publisher's Association web site you will see
the following for game sales.
For all of 1996 sales of entertainment software were:
DOS 303.4 million
Windows 32 bit 343.3 million
Windows 16 bit 169.6 million
Macintosh 45.5 million
For the 4th quarter of 1996 the figures were
DOS 67.3 million
Windows 32 bit 241.4 million
Windows 16 bit 68.2 million
Macintosh 15.8 million
So for the year Win32 outsold DOS. For the last quarter of the year it
outsold it by almost 4 to 1.
If you wish to verify the numbers the url is:
www.spa.org/research/releases/1996na.htm
Note that if you go to the SPA home page they have the link specified
wrong. Their link points to www.spa.org/research/releases/199na.htm
Therefore you must type the url yourself to retreive the data.
--
Hugh
Norbert Gruen
Hello!
May I introduce you to a point that matters beyond games.
This is based on German law, but other countries should have comparable
rulings.
My tax inspector will refuse to go to Redmond if I can't reproduce my
business records of the last 10 years.
Billy "improves" his file formats with every new version.
Aye, he has some filters for the old format, but they are not too
bulletproof.
For 10 year old data, their quality might be more questionable.
There are already huge warehouses of inaccesible data on mainframes due
to the lack of documentation, source, and the guy who wrote that COBOL
program.
This poses a significant risk to SOHO businesses, who will most likely
end up with M$ when they can't afford an AS400 from IBM.
Billy "improves" his GUI, too.
But subtly changing the menu tree and the shortcuts wreaks havoc on the
productivity of the average clerk.
In professional business, the clerk prefers an oldfashioned 3270-like
terminal where he can tap the keys blindly to his database mask while
talking to the customer or reading the paper form he works with.
No bank will hire half India just to process their records under W95
with the clipboard.
So even the wildest dreams of a trade-union member would'nt include
Billy being capable of reintroducing overmanning through the back door.
If Billy wants his trade secrets to be respected, he should respect the
trade secrets of his customers, too!
He never will eliminate the last illicit copy of any of his programs.
So he should stop opening barn doors to malicious action.
So Billy should upgrade quickly in professionality.
Kind regards
--
Norbert Gruen (umlaut u, ü)
Do Bill Gate$ a favour, support alternatives to Micro$oft!!!
"reply-to"-> Text, "from"->MIME
David Langdon
nate (nhu...@idir.net) wrote:
: Name one time when MS has upgraded their consumer os and broke
: backward compatibility.
Well, a few years ago Microsoft offered a patch which, while fixing a few
minor problems with Win 3.1, also prevented Win 3.1 from working with DR
DOS...
David Steidley
On Thu, 03 Apr 1997 02:13:31 Michael Warner wrote about "Re: John Carmack of ID comments on OS'":
> He ditched DOS because it offers no support for _anything_ - it's not an
> OS, it's a program loader and set of basic (and mostly hopeless) I/O
> services.
Um, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't "DOS" stand for Disk OPERATING SYSTEM? Wich is kind of interesting in itself, because it used to be called QDOS, wich stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Anyway, by your defenition, Win95 isn't an operating system either since it appears to be nothing but a program loader and a set of hopeless I/O devices in a "Standard, what the hell is that" kind of world.
--
See Ya!
Dave Steidley
Avionics Inspector, Central Missouri State University
"Only on an Amiga!" :-)
Michael Warner
> >| What I don't understand is why he ditched DOS. DOS is the only major
> >| gaming OS that doesn't suck performance like a vacuum.
He ditched DOS because it offers no support for _anything_ - it's not an
OS, it's a program loader and set of basic (and mostly hopeless) I/O
services.
> >I agree fully. Besides, with one DOS version, you cover Win95, Win3.1 and OS/2.
And take advantage of none of them.
> I agree, but the need to write custum drivers is huge. Microsoft knew
> this, which is the reason for DirectX. Without it, DOS+3.11 would probably
> still be outselling '95.
I got W95 primarily to get rid of the resource bottleneck. W31 is
hopeless in
that regard. And the interface is fun.
Have any of you guys actually _tried_ Quake for W95 (ie with the Direct*
interfaces)?
It works like a charm for me - full-screen performance feels the same as
the DOS
version, and the hit when running in a window feels like about 5-10%.
Unfortunately
qbench doesn't seem to work under it, so I can't get real figures. Sure,
more memory
and disk space are needed for the environment, but that's a small price
to pay for
all the goodies.
I'm pretty impressed with John Carmack (even though I can't win his car
:-() - he's
one of the few UNIXheads I've come across who doesn't operate on the
principle that
anything else sucks. As he says, Windows doesn't suck these days, thanks
in part
to him - if MS can get id on board their DirectX wagon they've got it
made in gaming.
So a lot of Direct* bugs are getting fixed at the moment :-)
Michael Warner
Kay-Yut Chen wrote:
>
> >I am sick and tired of people thinking PC games are all Doom and
> >Duke3d. The current most popular games are Daggerfall(an RPG) and
> >Civilization II(even you Mac and OS/2 users must have heard of that!).
The reason that John Carmack's opinions matter is that he is responsible
for the engines of the standard-setting 3D gaming environments over the
last few years; if his comments about upcoming improvements to Quake can
be taken at face value this will continue. If he says "Win32 will be our
main platform" you can bet that MS have a bunch of guys chasing all the
bugs in the Direct* APIs) he finds. Once Quake and/or its descendants
move from DOS to Win32 the issue of PC gaming platform dominance will
be settled.
He also considers Linux to be the second most important target platform
for future id games, which is heartening for everyone who turned purple
upon reading the previous paragraph :-)
Anthony D. Tribelli
Michael Warner (m...@ozemail.com.au) wrote:
: The reason that John Carmack's opinions matter is that he is responsible
: for the engines of the standard-setting 3D gaming environments over the
: last few years; if his comments about upcoming improvements to Quake can
: be taken at face value this will continue. If he says "Win32 will be our
: main platform" you can bet that MS have a bunch of guys chasing all the
: bugs in the Direct* APIs) he finds. Once Quake and/or its descendants
: move from DOS to Win32 the issue of PC gaming platform dominance will
: be settled.
:
: He also considers Linux to be the second most important target platform
: for future id games, which is heartening for everyone who turned purple
: upon reading the previous paragraph :-)
We must not have read the same file. I recall that after identifying
Win32 as the main platform, the Mac was referred to as the only other
platform that mattered. While he liked linux, it was clearly not a viable
market and his dream environment was based on NextStep, not linux.
Tony
--
------------------
Tony Tribelli
adtri...@acm.org
Adam Haun
On Tue, 01 Apr 1997 22:27:40 GMT, kyc...@hpl.hp.com (Kay-Yut Chen)
wrote:
>
>>I am sick and tired of people thinking PC games are all Doom and
>>Duke3d. The current most popular games are Daggerfall(an RPG) and
>>Civilization II(even you Mac and OS/2 users must have heard of that!).
>>
>
>Those games are popular like 6 months ago. Now they are:
>Diablo, Magic the Gathering and Interstate 76. <g>
Magic and I76 aren't out yet, are they? And as of last month,
according to CGW(have it right here) CivII and Daggerfall are the most
played current games.
Glenn Davies
On Thu, 3 Apr 1997 02:28:15 GMT, a...@netcom.com (Anthony D. Tribelli)
wrote:
I think you should reread it. Here's what he actually said about both
platforms.
>>Linux
>>I consider linux the second most important platform after win32 for id.
>>From a biz standpoint it would be ludicrous to place it even on par with
>>mac or os/2, but for our types of games that are designed to be hacked,
>>linux has a big plus: the highest hacker to user ratio of any os. I don't
>>personally develop on linux, because I do my unixy things with NEXTSTEP,
>>but I have a lot of technical respect for it.
>>
>>MacOS
>>From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
>>and it doesn't matter all that much. We have professional ports done to
>>MacOS instead of unsupported hack ports, which is a mixed blessing. They
>>come out a lot later (still waiting for quake...), but are more full
>>featured. I have zero respect for the MacOS on a technical basis. They just
>>stood still and let microsoft run right over them from waaay behind. I
>>wouldn't develop on it.
---
Glenn Davies inet: gl...@direct.ca
Imago Systems Inc - Virtual Reality Technology
phone: (604) 681-9288 fax: (604) 681-8705
Tom Wheeley
In article <33428C...@ozemail.com.au>
m...@ozemail.com.au "Michael Warner" writes:
> I'm pretty impressed with John Carmack (even though I can't win his car
> :-() - he's
> one of the few UNIXheads I've come across who doesn't operate on the
> principle that
> anything else sucks. As he says, Windows doesn't suck these days, thanks
> in part
The reason he likes Win32 is that it does a lot of the boring part of
writing games for him.
> to him - if MS can get id on board their DirectX wagon they've got it
> made in gaming.
> So a lot of Direct* bugs are getting fixed at the moment :-)
id are on the DirectX wagon as they helped write it.
--
:sb)
Tom Wheeley
In article <5hv7js$l...@news.corpcomm.net>
stei...@iland.net "David Steidley" writes:
> On Thu, 03 Apr 1997 02:13:31 Michael Warner wrote about "Re: John Carmack of ID
> comments on OS'":
>
> > He ditched DOS because it offers no support for _anything_ - it's not an
> > OS, it's a program loader and set of basic (and mostly hopeless) I/O
> > services.
>
> Um, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't "DOS" stand for Disk OPERATING
> SYSTEM? Wich is kind of interesting in itself, because it used to be called
> QDOS, wich stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Anyway, by your
> defenition, Win95 isn't an operating system either since it appears to be
> nothing but a program loader and a set of hopeless I/O devices in a "Standard,
> what the hell is that" kind of world.
There is more to a modern operating system for a general purpose personal
computer than a program loader, a couple of slow IO routines and a brain
damaged shell. Multitasking, perhaps? Virtual memory? Support for CDROm
drives in the OS? :-)
DOS still is Quick 'n' Dirty.
--
:sb)
Anthony D. Tribelli
Glenn Davies (gl...@direct.ca) wrote:
: a...@netcom.com (Anthony D. Tribelli)
: >Michael Warner (m...@ozemail.com.au) wrote:
: >: He also considers Linux to be the second most important target platform
: >: for future id games, which is heartening for everyone who turned purple
: >: upon reading the previous paragraph :-)
: >
: >We must not have read the same file. I recall that after identifying
: >Win32 as the main platform, the Mac was referred to as the only other
: >platform that mattered. While he liked linux, it was clearly not a viable
: >market and his dream environment was based on NextStep, not linux.
:
: I think you should reread it. Here's what he actually said about both
: platforms.
:
: >>Linux
: >>I consider linux the second most important platform after win32 for id.
: >>From a biz standpoint it would be ludicrous to place it even on par with
: >>mac or os/2, but for our types of games that are designed to be hacked,
: >>linux has a big plus: the highest hacker to user ratio of any os. I don't
: >>personally develop on linux, because I do my unixy things with NEXTSTEP,
: >>but I have a lot of technical respect for it.
: >>
: >>MacOS
: >>From a money making standpoint, the only OS other than win32 that matters,
: >>and it doesn't matter all that much. We have professional ports done to
: >>MacOS instead of unsupported hack ports, which is a mixed blessing. They
: >>come out a lot later (still waiting for quake...), but are more full
: >>featured. I have zero respect for the MacOS on a technical basis. They just
: >>stood still and let microsoft run right over them from waaay behind. I
: >>wouldn't develop on it.
Thanks for re-posting the original but it seems to be backing up my
opinion, I was equating important with profittable. Carmack seems to
define important differently. I guess we only agree that linux is
ludicrous from a money making point of view, and that it's a good UNIX.
Hopefully this will change someday.
Wasn't there a Rhapsody section in the original? I guess there is
agreement that his "ideal" OS is derived from NextStep and not linux. That
if Apple adds game support Rhapsody will replace WinNT as his main
development environment.
Maynard Handley
In article <3343099a...@news.earthlink.net>, ka...@earthlink.net
(Adam Haun) wrote:
Well isn't that the real game? To rant loudly in newsgroups about things
and how my what's coming up will be better than your what's coming up :-)
?
Once anything ships that fun stops and we have to move on to the next thing.
Maynard
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
--
My opinion only
Maynard Handley
In article <5hv7js$l...@news.corpcomm.net>, David Steidley
<stei...@iland.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Apr 1997 02:13:31 Michael Warner wrote about "Re: John
Carmack of ID comments on OS'":
>
> > He ditched DOS because it offers no support for _anything_ - it's not an
> > OS, it's a program loader and set of basic (and mostly hopeless) I/O
> > services.
>
> Um, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't "DOS" stand for Disk OPERATING
SYSTEM? Wich is kind of interesting in itself, because it used to be
called QDOS, wich stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Anyway, by
your defenition, Win95 isn't an operating system either since it appears
to be nothing but a program loader and a set of hopeless I/O devices in a
"Standard, what the hell is that" kind of world.
>
Oh for gods sake. I'm no fan of DOS, but basing one's arguments on the
letters in the name of a system strikes me as getting pretty desperate.
What are we going to have next? "UNIX sucks because I think the letter X
is clumsy?"
Maynard
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
--
My opinion only
Steven C. Den Beste
Adam Haun wrote:
>
> On Tue, 01 Apr 1997 22:27:40 GMT, kyc...@hpl.hp.com (Kay-Yut Chen)
> wrote:
>
> >
> >>I am sick and tired of people thinking PC games are all Doom and
> >>Duke3d. The current most popular games are Daggerfall(an RPG) and
> >>Civilization II(even you Mac and OS/2 users must have heard of that!).
> >>
> >
> >Those games are popular like 6 months ago. Now they are:
> >Diablo, Magic the Gathering and Interstate 76. <g>
>
> Magic and I76 aren't out yet, are they? And as of last month,
> according to CGW(have it right here) CivII and Daggerfall are the most
> played current games.
Both "BattleMage" and "Magic The Gathering" are out. The Microprose game
is really outstanding. I've had it for two weeks.
Don't forget that print magazines are typically a couple of months
behind simply because of the lead-time to print.
Erik Funkenbusch
On Tue, 01 Apr 1997 17:52:23 -0800, Brian Kimball
<Brian_...@HMC.Edu> wrote:
>nate wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 31 Mar 1997 19:44:35 -0800, Dean Dancey <dt...@sympatico.ca>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >Yup, make ALL the programs run ONLY under WIN95. Save time, money,
>> >and just think, when Billy Boy decides that you have a good product, you
>> >won't even have to worry about profits. Cuz you gave the right to
>> >package your software with his. And, in two years, when he makes the
>> >NEW version, you get to write the program again, because nothing will be
>> >backwards compatible. So Billy just rakes in the cash from all these
>> >suckers.-Dean Dancey
>>
>> Name one time when MS has upgraded their consumer os and broke
>> backward compatibility. I have yet to find a dos app that wont run
>> under 3.1 or 95 nor a 3.1 app that wont run under 95. MS is like
>> apple, if they introduce a new os that wont run older apps nobodys
>> gonna buy it. It seems to me that since Bill Gates is in this to make
>> money, and selling OS's is his way of doing it, he would do very
>> little to dissuade anyone from buying the on he offers.
>
>Netscape broke, thanks to M$. According to your logic M$ would never do
>this because Netscape is a widely used and popular program, but it did,
>intentionally or unintentionally. Your argument only works with dos
>apps, not with legacy Win apps. I've found that old win apps are
>usually terribly buggy when combined with M$-95.
Netscape did *NOT* break. All it required was to copy winsock.old to
winsock.dll. This was documented in the release notes as well as told
to anyone that called in for their free 30 days of tech support.
In addition, if you configured DUN correctly you could use Netscape
without using the netscape dialer or winsock.
>> You need to
>> think a little before you post such nonsense.
>
>Hehe. Funny to hear you say that. Dean posts a half-joke/half-truth,
>obviously not meant to be taken literally, and you read it literally,
>responding with exaggerations and a bad attitude.
>
>> As far as the new QUAKE
>> being win95 only, did it ever occur to you that Win95 has been
>> optimized to run games very well?
>